Massive neutrinos and interacting dark matter look alike through the lens of lensing

Luis A. Anchordoqui; Danny Marfatia; Jorge F. Soriano

doi:10.1103/r89c-jtp2

Massive neutrinos and interacting dark matter look alike through the lens of lensing

Luis A. Anchordoqui ^1,2,3, Danny Marfatia⁴, and Jorge F. Soriano ¹

¹Department of Physics and Astronomy, Lehman College, City University of New York, New York 10468, USA
²Department of Physics, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York 10016, USA
³Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History, New York 10024, USA
⁴Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2505 Correa Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 103517 – Published 11 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/r89c-jtp2

Abstract

We demonstrate that the suppression in the lensing power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) caused by massive neutrinos can be mimicked by dark matter-baryon interactions at the precision of next-generation CMB experiments. Thus, a determination of neutrino masses from the CMB lensing power spectrum may be compromised. We illustrate the degeneracy for a dark matter-proton cross section $\propto v^{- 4}$ , which arises in the $t$ -channel exchange of an ultralight mediator in the nonrelativistic limit.

Physical Review D

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Massive neutrinos and interacting dark matter look alike through the lens of lensing

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Massive neutrinos and interacting dark matter look alike through the lens of lensing

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