Measurement of Neutrino Masses from Relative Velocities

Hong-Ming Zhu, Ue-Li Pen, Xuelei Chen, Derek Inman, Yu Yu

Published 2013-11-14, updated 2016-05-09Version 3

We present a new technique to measure neutrino masses using their flow field relative to dark matter. Present day streaming motions of neutrinos relative to dark matter and baryons are several hundred km/s, comparable with their thermal velocity dispersion. This results in a unique dipole anisotropic distortion of the matter-neutrino cross power spectrum, which is observable through the dipole distortion in the cross correlation of different galaxy populations. Such a dipole vanishes if not for this relative velocity and so it is a clean signature for neutrino mass. We estimate the size of this effect and find that current and future galaxy surveys may be sensitive to these signature distortions.