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Zhichao Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhichao Zeng.

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Evidence of Neutrino Enhanced Clustering in a Complete Sample of Sloan Survey Clusters, Implying $\sum m_ν= 0.119 \pm 0.034$ eV

The clustering amplitude of 7143 clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is found to increase with cluster mass, closely agreeing with the Gaussian random field hypothesis for structure formation. The amplitude of the observed cluster correlation exceeds the predictions from pure cold dark matter (CDM) simulation by $\simeq 6\%$ for the standard Planck-based values of the cosmological parameters. We show that this excess can be naturally accounted for by free streaming of light neutrinos, which opposes gravitational growth, so clusters formed at fixed mass are fewer and hence more biased than for a pure CDM density field. An enhancement of the cluster bias by 7\% matches the observations, corresponding to a total neutrino mass, $m_ν = 0.119 \pm 0.034$ eV at 67\% confidence level, for the standard relic neutrino density. If ongoing laboratory experiments favor a normal neutrino mass hierarchy then we may infer a somewhat larger total mass than the minimum oscillation based value, $\sum m_ν \simeq 0.056eV$, with 90\% confidence. Much higher precision can be achieved by applying our method to a larger sample of more distant clusters with weak lensing derived masses.

astro-ph.CO

Effects of neutrino mass and asymmetry on cosmological structure formation

Light but massive cosmological neutrinos do not cluster significantly on small scales, due to their high thermal velocities. With finite masses, cosmological neutrinos become part of the total matter field and contribute to its smoothing. Structure formation in the presence of massive neutrinos is therefore impeded compared to that in the standard $Λ$CDM cosmology with massless neutrinos. Neutrinos' masses also distort the anisotropy power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB). Furthermore, a finite chemical potential $μ$ for cosmological neutrinos, still allowed by current data, would have a non-negligible impact on CMB and structure formation. We consistently evaluate effects of neutrino masses and chemical potentials on the matter power spectrum by use of a neutrino-involved N-body simulation, with cosmological parameters obtained from a Markov-Chian Moonte-Carlo (MCMC) refitting of CMB data. Our results show that while a finite averaged neutrino mass $m_ν$ tends to suppress the matter power spectrum in a range of wave numbers, the neutrino degeneracy parameters ${ξ_i \equiv μ_i /T}$ ($i=$1, 2, 3) enhance the latter, leading to a large parameter degeneracy between $m_ν$ and $ξ_i$. We provide an empirical formula for the effects on the matter power spectrum in a selected range of wave numbers induced by $m_ν$ and $η\equiv \sqrt{\sum_i ξ^2_i}$. Observing a strong correlation between $m_ν$ and $η$, we propose a single redshift-independent parameter $m_ν- \frac{4}{3}η^2$ to characterize the neutrino effects on the matter power spectrum.

astro-ph.CO