2023/07/14 by Leander Thiele, Thiele, Leander, Elena Massara +11 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.07555
openalex publication_date 2023/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cosmic voids identified in the spatial distribution of galaxies provide complementary information to two-point statistics. In particular, constraints on the neutrino mass sum, ∑ mν, promise to benefit from the inclusion of void statistics. We perform inference on the CMASS NGC sample of SDSS-III/BOSS with the aim of constraining ∑ mν. We utilize the void size function, the void galaxy cross power spectrum, and the galaxy auto power spectrum. To extract constraints from these summary statistics we use a simulation-based approach, specifically implicit likelihood inference. We populate approximate gravity-only, particle neutrino cosmological simulations with an expressive halo occupation distribution model. With a conservative scale cut of kmax=0.15 h/Mpc and a Planck-inspired LCDM prior, we find upper bounds on ∑ mν of 0.43 and 0.35 eV from the galaxy auto power spectrum and the full data vector, respectively (95% credible interval). We observe hints that the void statistics may be most effective at constraining ∑ mν from below. We also substantiate the usual assumption that the void size function is Poisson distributed.