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Download or read book Constraining Neutrino Masses with Gravitational Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background written by Gabrielle Simard and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By deflecting photon trajectories, weak gravitational lensing shifts cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. The power spectrum of the lensing deflection field carries significant information about structure formation.The growth of structure in the universe is affected by neutrinos, confirmed to have a non-zero total mass by the latest neutrino flavor oscillation experiments. Using statistical estimators of the deflection field, we have evaluated through a Fisher forecast the capacity of present and near future CMB experiments SPT-SZ, SPTpol and Planck to constrain cosmological parameters and the total neutrino mass. We find that including lensing information in the forecast allows the SPT-SZ, SPTpol and Planck combined constraint to improve from 0.32 eV to 0.089 eV. The 1-sigma constraint on the sum of neutrino masses from Planck alone improves from 0.39 eV to 0.11 eV when including lensing. Furthermore, we conclude that a greater SPTpol survey area is favored in order to maximize the SPT-SZ, SPTpol and Planck combined constraint on the total neutrino mass. " --