Systematic errors in the measurement of neutrino masses due to baryonic feedback processes: Prospects for stage IV lensing surveys

TL;DR

This paper investigates how baryonic feedback processes affect the measurement of neutrino masses through weak lensing surveys, highlighting the need to model these effects accurately for future precision cosmology.

Contribution

It demonstrates that baryonic feedback significantly biases neutrino mass estimates from weak lensing and emphasizes the importance of including feedback effects in modeling for upcoming surveys.

Findings

Baryonic feedback can cause large errors in neutrino mass estimates.

CMB lensing is less sensitive to baryonic feedback on scales below 2000.

Combining CMB and galaxy lensing helps disentangle feedback effects from neutrino mass signals.

Abstract

We examine the importance of baryonic feedback effects on the matter power spectrum on small scales, and the implications for the precise measurement of neutrino masses through gravitational weak lensing. Planned large galaxy surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Telescope (LSST) and Euclid are expected to measure the sum of neutrino masses to extremely high precision, sufficient to detect non-zero neutrino masses even in the minimal mass normal hierarchy. We show that weak lensing of galaxies while being a very good probe of neutrino masses, is extremely sensitive to baryonic feedback processes. We use publicly available results from the Overwhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project to investigate the effects of active galactic nuclei feedback, the nature of the stellar initial mass function, and gas cooling rates, on the measured weak lensing shear power spectrum. Using the Fisher matrix formalism and priors from CMB+BAO data, we show that when one does not account for feedback, the measured neutrino mass may be substantially larger or smaller than the true mass, depending on the dominant feedback mechanism, with the mass error |\Delta m_nu| often exceeding the mass m_nu itself. We also consider gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and show that it is not sensitive to baryonic feedback on scales l < 2000, although CMB experiments that aim for sensitivities sigma(m_nu) < 0.02 eV will need to include baryonic effects in modeling the CMB lensing potential. A combination of CMB lensing and galaxy lensing can help break the degeneracy between neutrino masses and baryonic feedback processes. We conclude that future large galaxy lensing surveys such as LSST and Euclid can only measure neutrino masses accurately if the matter power spectrum can be measured to similar accuracy.