MassiveNuS: cosmological massive neutrino simulations

Abstract

The non-zero mass of neutrinos suppresses the growth of cosmic structure on\nsmall scales. Since the level of suppression depends on the sum of the masses\nof the three active neutrino species, the evolution of large-scale structure is\na promising tool to constrain the total mass of neutrinos and possibly shed\nlight on the mass hierarchy. In this work, we investigate these effects via a\nlarge suite of N-body simulations that include massive neutrinos using an\nanalytic linear-response approximation: the Cosmological Massive Neutrino\nSimulations (MassiveNuS). The simulations include the effects of radiation on\nthe background expansion, as well as the clustering of neutrinos in response to\nthe nonlinear dark matter evolution. We allow three cosmological parameters to\nvary: the neutrino mass sum M_nu in the range of 0-0.6 eV, the total matter\ndensity Omega_m, and the primordial power spectrum amplitude A_s. The rms\ndensity fluctuation in spheres of 8 comoving Mpc/h (sigma_8) is a derived\nparameter as a result. Our data products include N-body snapshots, halo\ncatalogues, merger trees, ray- traced galaxy lensing convergence maps for four\nsource redshift planes between z_s=1-2.5, and ray-traced cosmic microwave\nbackground lensing convergence maps. We describe the simulation procedures and\ncode validation in this paper. The data are publicly available at\nhttp://columbialensing.org.\n