Exploring the Limits: Neutrino Mass and Interacting Dark Sector in the DESI Era
Abstract
We constrain three interacting dark matter--dark energy scenarios using cosmic microwave background measurements, DESI DR2 baryon acoustic oscillations, and the PantheonPlus, Union3, and DES-Dovekie Type Ia supernova compilations. We consider interacting vacuum energy and interacting dark energy with a constant equation of state in the phantom and quintessence regimes, analyzing each scenario with either a fixed total neutrino mass or a freely varying effective neutrino mass. When the positivity prior is relaxed, all three scenarios favor negative effective neutrino masses for every dataset combination. Although some combinations permit small positive masses, none of the 95\% confidence intervals reaches the minimum mass required by neutrino oscillation experiments. Allowing the effective neutrino mass to vary produces significances for a nonzero coupling reaching approximately 3σ, but the preferred masses remain negative. These results demonstrate that the interaction and constant dark energy equations of state considered here fail to resolve the DESI neutrino-mass tension.
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BibTeX
@misc{yang2026exploring,
title = {{Exploring the Limits: Neutrino Mass and Interacting Dark Sector in the DESI Era}},
author = {Weiqiang Yang and Sibo Zhang and Supriya Pan and Luis A. Anchordoqui and Eleonora Di Valentino},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.33729},
eprint = {2610.33729},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33729},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Exploring the Limits: Neutrino Mass and Interacting Dark Sector in the DESI Era
AU - Weiqiang Yang
AU - Sibo Zhang
AU - Supriya Pan
AU - Luis A. Anchordoqui
AU - Eleonora Di Valentino
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/24
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.33729
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33729
AB - We constrain three interacting dark matter--dark energy scenarios using cosmic microwave background measurements, DESI DR2 baryon acoustic oscillations, and the PantheonPlus, Union3, and DES-Dovekie Type Ia supernova compilations. We consider interacting vacuum energy and interacting dark energy with a constant equation of state in the phantom and quintessence regimes, analyzing each scenario with either a fixed total neutrino mass or a freely varying effective neutrino mass. When the positivity prior is relaxed, all three scenarios favor negative effective neutrino masses for every dataset combination. Although some combinations permit small positive masses, none of the 95\% confidence intervals reaches the minimum mass required by neutrino oscillation experiments. Allowing the effective neutrino mass to vary produces significances for a nonzero coupling reaching approximately 3σ, but the preferred masses remain negative. These results demonstrate that the interaction and constant dark energy equations of state considered here fail to resolve the DESI neutrino-mass tension.
ER -