Probing the neutrino mass hierarchy with CMB weak lensing
  We forecast constraints on cosmological parameters with primary CMB
anisotropy information and weak lensing reconstruction with a future
post-Planck CMB experiment, the Cosmic Origins Explorer (COrE), using
oscillation data on the neutrino mass splittings as prior information. Our MCMC
simulations in flat models with a non-evolving equation-of-state of dark energy
w give typical 68% upper bounds on the total neutrino mass of 0.136 eV and
0.098 eV for the inverted and normal hierarchies respectively, assuming the
total summed mass is close to the minimum allowed by the oscillation data for
the respective hierarchies (0.10 eV and 0.06 eV). Including information from
future baryon acoustic oscillation measurements with the complete BOSS, Type 1a
supernovae distance moduli from WFIRST, and a realistic prior on the Hubble
constant, these upper limits shrink to 0.118 eV and 0.080 eV for the inverted
and normal hierarchies, respectively. Addition of these distance priors also
yields percent-level constraints on w. We find tension between our MCMC results
and the results of a Fisher matrix analysis, most likely due to a strong
geometric degeneracy between the total neutrino mass, the Hubble constant, and
w in the unlensed CMB power spectra. If the minimal-mass, normal hierarchy were
realised in nature, the inverted hierarchy should be disfavoured by the full
data combination at typically greater than the 2-sigma level. For the
minimal-mass inverted hierarchy, we compute the Bayes' factor between the two
hierarchies for various combinations of our forecast datasets, and find that
the future probes considered here should be able to provide `strong' evidence
(odds ratio 12:1) for the inverted hierarchy. Finally, we consider potential
biases of the other cosmological parameters from assuming the wrong hierarchy
and find that all biases on the parameters are below their 1-sigma marginalised
errors.
