Strengthening the bound on the mass of the lightest neutrino with terrestrial and cosmological experiments

We determine the upper limit on the mass of the lightest neutrino from the most robust recent cosmological and terrestrial data. Marginalising over possible effective relativistic degrees of freedom at early times ($N_\mathrm{eff}$) and assuming normal mass ordering, the mass of the lightest neutrino is less than 0.037 eV at 95% confidence; with inverted ordering, the bound is 0.042 eV. This improves nearly 60% on other recent limits, bounding the mass of the lightest neutrino to be barely larger than the largest mass splitting. We show the impacts of realistic mass models, and different sources of $N_\mathrm{eff}$.