South Pole Telescope Data Places Better Limit on Neutrino Mass

Posted by Unknown on Monday April 2, 2012 @05:58AM from the billions-of-years-in-the-making dept.

An anonymous reader writes an excerpt from a press release by the University of Chicago: "Analysis of data from the 10-meter South Pole Telescope is providing new support for the most widely accepted explanation of dark energy — the source of the mysterious force that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe." The research resulted in three papers involving new constraints on the mass of neutrinos, a measurement of the angular power spectrum of the CMB, and a catalog of newly discovered galaxy clusters. The data lends a bit more support to the cosmological constant theory of dark energy.

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lower limit on neutrino mass? by snoop.daub · 2012-04-02 07:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

The experiment reports a new upper limit on the neutrino mass. I've seen upper limit estimates before this one, but I don't ever recall seeing a lower limit reported on a direct measurement of the neutrino mass. Nonzero mass is a requirement in standard theories of neutrino oscillation but that's a consequence of the theory, not a direct measurement. Is there a direct measurement of a lower limit out there that I'm not aware of?