On the (non-)degeneracy of massive neutrinos and elastic interactions in the dark sector

Cosmological models featuring an elastic interaction in the dark sector at linear order has been shown to provide a promising scenario for alleviating the σ₈ tension. A natural question for these scenarios is whether there could be a degeneracy between the interaction and massive neutrinos that also contribute to erasing structures at late times. In this work we investigate the presence of such a degeneracy and show that the two effects do not exhibit strong correlations.