From Evidence to Evident: Decisive Cosmological Evidence for the Normal Neutrino Mass Hierarchy

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From Evidence to Evident: Decisive Cosmological Evidence for the Normal Neutrino Mass Hierarchy

Authors

Raul Jimenez, Carlos Peña Garay, Fergus Simpson, Licia Verde

Abstract

Cosmological data have reached the precision needed to turn the neutrino mass ordering from a weak Bayesian preference into a decisive model-selection test. We compute the evidence for the Normal and Inverted Hierarchies by combining DESI DR2 clustering with NuFIT oscillation data. In baseline $Λ$CDM, DESI DR2 plus Planck CamSpec gives $Σm_ν<0.0642\,{\rm eV}$ at 95\% confidence, close to the normal-ordering floor, $Σm_ν^{\rm NH}\simeq0.059\,{\rm eV}$, but well below the inverted-ordering minimum, $Σm_ν^{\rm IH}\simeq0.099\,{\rm eV}$. Thus the inverted hierarchy lies in the tail of the cosmological likelihood. The Bayes factor $K=P(D|{\rm NH})/P(D|{\rm IH})$ exceeds $460$ even for a conservative reference prior, and remains strong, $K>40$, in baseline-model extensions. We show that this result is robust to the choice between a reference prior and a physically motivated logarithmic hierarchical prior, marking the transition from {\em prior-sensitive evidence} to {\em likelihood-dominated exclusion} of the inverted hierarchy within standard cosmology. Embedding these priors in the two-dimensional design space of measure (logarithmic versus linear in mass) and structure (hierarchical versus non-hierarchical), we find that all four prior constructions give decisive evidence under DESI DR2, with residual prior dependence governed mainly by the measure -- a factor $\sim\!10$ in $K$ -- rather than by the hierarchy assumption. At the prior-family level, the evidence favors the SJPV prior predictive over HS by a Bayes factor above $4,700$ across each matched-support variation tested. The favored normal ordering pushes the effective Majorana mass to the few-meV regime, with median $m_{ββ}=3.28\,{\rm meV}$ and 95\% credible interval $0.95<m_{ββ}<11.55\,{\rm meV}$, below the inverted-ordering target for upcoming neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments.

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