Planting neutrino SE-EdS: A < 3% accurate clustering approximation for neutrinos and other hot dark matter

Abstract

The age of the cosmic neutrino is upon us. Aside from their fundamental importance to particle physics and the recent tensions in their mass scale $M_ν= \sum m_ν$, neutrinos' degeneracies with other cosmological parameters in analyses of scale-dependent cosmic clustering will significantly affect the estimates of these parameters, making accurate, inexpensive, easily-implemented approximations essential tools for theoretical cosmology. We present a new linear approximation, SE-EdS, applicable to non-relativistic neutrinos and other hot dark matter, which is exact in the linear Einstein-de Sitter case, and < 3% accurate for a broad range of flat and non-flat cosmologies characterized by parameters $0.2 \leq Ω_{m,0} \leq 1$, $0 \leq Ω_{ν,0} \leq 0.018$, $-0.1 \leq Ω_{K,0} \leq 0.1$, and $w_0 \leq -0.6$, at all length scales. This broad coverage in $Ω_{m,0}$ makes SE-EdS ideal for N-body simulations, whose redshift range $z \lesssim 100$ demands accuracy for time-dependent $Ω_m$ between unity and the preferred late-time values $\sim 0.3$. SE-EdS may be used to paint neutrinos into simulations in Fourier space, where its < 3% error and neutrinos' $\leq$ 3% matter fraction guarantees < 0.1% errors in the total matter density contrast, thereby including neutrino effects upon clustering at negligible computational cost. We quantify the approximation's accuracy; extend it to a broad range of cosmologies; and explore its correspondence with higher-order corrections to existing linear response schemes. A simple implementation is available online at https://codeberg.org/upadhye/SE-EdS .