New neutrino mass bounds from SDSS-II Data Release 8 photometric luminous galaxies

We present neutrino mass bounds using 900,000 luminous galaxies with photometric redshifts measured from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Data Release 8. The galaxies have photometric redshifts between z = 0.45 and z = 0.65 and cover 10,000 deg², thus probing a volume of 3 h ^–3 Gpc³ and enabling tight constraints to be derived on the amount of dark matter in the form of massive neutrinos. A new bound on the sum of neutrino masses ∑m _ν < 0.27 eV, at the 95% confidence level (CL), is obtained after combining our sample of galaxies, which we call "CMASS," with Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) seven-year cosmic microwave background data and the most recent measurement of the Hubble parameter from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This constraint is obtained with a conservative multipole range of 30 < ℓ < 200 in order to minimize nonlinearities, and a free bias parameter in each of the four redshift bins. We study the impact of assuming this linear galaxy bias model using mock catalogs and find that this model causes a small (~1σ-1.5σ) bias in Ω_DM h ₂. For this reason, we also quote neutrino bounds based on a conservative galaxy bias model containing additional, shot-noise-like free parameters. In this conservative case, the bounds are significantly weakened, e.g., ∑m _ν < 0.38 eV (95% CL) for WMAP+HST+CMASS (ℓ_max = 200). We also study the dependence of the neutrino bound on the multipole range (ℓmax = 150 versus ℓ_max = 200) and on which combination of data sets is included as a prior. The addition of supernova and/or baryon acoustic oscillation data does not significantly improve the neutrino mass bound once the HST prior is included. A companion paper describes the construction of the angular power spectra in detail and derives constraints on a general cosmological model, including the dark energy equation of state w and the spatial curvature Ω _K , while a second companion paper presents a measurement of the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations from the same data set. All three works are based on the catalog by Ross et al.