Constraining effective neutrino species with bispectrum of large scale structures

Abstract

Relativistic and free-streaming particles like neutrinos leave imprints in large scale structures (LSS), providing probes of the effective number of neutrino species N_(eff). In this paper, we use the Fisher formalism to forecast N_(eff) constraints from the bispectrum (B) of LSS for current and future galaxy redshift surveys, specifically using information from the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). Modeling the galaxy bispectrum at the tree-level, we find that adding the bispectrum constraints to current CMB constraints from Planck can improve upon the Planck-only constraints on N_(eff) by about 10%–40% depending on the survey. Compared to the Planck+power spectrum (P) constraints previously explored in the literature, using Planck + P + B provides a further improvement of about 5%–30%. Besides using BAO wiggles alone, we also explore using the total information which includes both the wiggles and the broadband information (which is subject to systematics challenges), generally yielding better results. Finally, we exploit the interference feature of the BAOs in the bispectrum to select a subset of triangles with the most information on N_(eff). This allows for the reduction of computational cost while keeping most of the information, as well as for circumventing some of the shortcomings of applying directly to the bispectrum the current wiggle extraction algorithm valid for the power spectrum. In sum, our study validates that the current Planck constraint on N_(eff) can be significantly improved with the aid of galaxy surveys before the next-generation CMB experiments like CMB-Stage 4.

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