We study the impact of assumptions made about the neutrino mass ordering on cosmological parameter estimation with the purpose of understanding whether in the future it will be possible to infer the specific neutrino mass distribution from cosmological data. We find that although the commonly used assumption of a degenerate neutrino hierarchy is manifestly wrong and leads to changes in cosmological observables such as the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure compared to the correct (normal or inverted) neutrino hierarchy, the induced changes are so small that even with extremely optimistic assumptions about future data they will remain undetectable. We are thus able to conclude that while cosmology can probe the neutrino contribution to the cosmic energy density extremely precisely (and hence provide a detection of a non-zero total neutrino mass at high significance), it will not be possible to directly measure the individual neutrino masses.

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使用宇宙学测量单个中微子的质量状态需要什么？

我们研究了关于中微子质量排序的假设对宇宙学参数估计的影响，目的是了解将来是否有可能从宇宙学数据中推断出特定的中微子质量分布。我们发现，虽然普遍使用的简并中微子等级假设显然是错误的，并且导致宇宙学可观测值的变化，例如与正确（正常或倒置）的中微子等级相比，宇宙微波背景和大尺度结构的变化，但诱发的变化是如此小到即使对未来数据做出极其乐观的假设，它们仍然无法检测到。