Atacama Cosmology Telescope: The persistence of neutrino self-interaction in cosmological measurements

Creators: Kreisch, Christina D.; Park, Minsu; Calabrese, Erminia; Cyr-Racine, Francis-Yan; An, Rui; Bond, J. Richard; Doré, Olivier¹; Dunkley, Jo; Gallardo, Patricio; Gluscevic, Vera; Hill, J. Colin; Hincks, Adam D.; Madhavacheril, Mathew S.; McMahon, Jeff; Moodley, Kavilan; Morris, Thomas W.; Nati, Federico; Page, Lyman A.; Partridge, Bruce; Salatino, Maria; Sifón, Cristóbal; Spergel, David N.; Vargas, Cristian; Wollack, Edward J.

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We use data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) DR4 to search for the presence of neutrino self-interaction in the cosmic microwave background. Consistent with prior works, the posterior distributions we find are bimodal, with one mode consistent with $Λ CDM$ and one where neutrinos strongly self-interact. By combining ACT data with large-scale information from WMAP, we find that a delayed onset of neutrino free streaming caused by significantly strong neutrino self-interaction is compatible with these data at the $2 - 3 σ$ level. As seen in the past, the preference shifts to $Λ CDM$ with the inclusion of Planck data. We determine that the preference for strong neutrino self-interaction is largely driven by angular scales corresponding to $700 ≲ ℓ ≲ 1000$ in the ACT E-mode polarization data. This region is expected to be key to discriminate between neutrino self-interacting modes and will soon be probed with more sensitive data.

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Acknowledgement

C. D. K.’s work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant DGE 1656466. E. C. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 849169). The work of F.-Y. C.-R is supported by the NSF under Grant No. AST-2008696. J. D. is supported by NSF Grants No. 1814971 and No. 2108126. We would like to thank the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing, supported in part by the NSF, for providing some of the research computing resources used in this work. Part of this work was performed at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1607611. Part of this work was done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. J. C. H. acknowledges support from NSF Grant No. AST-2108536. A. D. H. acknowledges support from the Sutton Family Chair in Science, Christianity and Cultures and from the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto. K. M. acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported in part by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. Support for ACT was through the U.S. National Science Foundation through Awards No. AST-0408698, No. AST-0965625, and No. AST-1440226 for the ACT project, as well as Awards No. PHY-0355328, No. PHY-0855887, and No. PHY-1214379. Funding was also provided by Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) award to UBC. ACT operates in the Parque Astronómico Atacama in northern Chile under the auspices of the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID). The development of multichroic detectors and lenses was supported by NASA Grants No. NNX13AE56G and No. NNX14AB58G. Detector research at N. I. S. T. was supported by the NIST Innovations in Measurement Science program. We acknowledge use of the matplotlib [116], numpy [117], getdist [118], and cosmomc [102] packages and use of the Boltzmann code camb [101].

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PhysRevD.109.043501.pdf

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