Cosmological Simulations with Massive Neutrinos: Efficiency and Accuracy

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient N-body simulation method for accurately modeling the effects of massive neutrinos on large-scale structure, addressing computational challenges and improving precision in cosmological predictions.

Contribution

It presents a semi-linear neutrino response implementation integrated into the optimized CUBE 2.0 code, enhancing simulation efficiency and accuracy for neutrino mass effects.

Findings

Accurate power spectra and halo statistics with the new method

Quantified neutrino mass effects on nonlinear matter power spectra

Demonstrated the importance of correcting expansion history for massive neutrinos

Abstract

Constraining neutrino mass through cosmological observations relies on precise simulations to calibrate their effects on large scale structure, while these simulations must overcome computational challenges like dealing with large velocity dispersions and small intrinsic neutrino perturbations. We present an efficient N-body implementation with semi-linear neutrino mass response which gives accurate power spectra and halo statistics. We explore the necessity of correcting the expansion history caused by massive neutrinos and the transition between relativistic and non-relativistic components. The above method of including neutrino masses is built into the memory-, scalability-, and precision-optimized parallel N-body simulation code CUBE 2.0. Through a suite of neutrino simulations, we precisely quantify the neutrino mass effects on the nonlinear matter power spectra and halo statistics.