  The presence of massive neutrinos has still not been revealed by the
cosmological data. We consider a novel method based on the two-point
line-of-sight correlation function of high-resolution Lyman-$\alpha$ data to
achieve this end in the paper. We adopt semi-analytic models of Lyman-$\alpha$
clouds for the study. We employ Fisher matrix technique to show that it is
possible to achieve a scenario in which the covariance of the two-point
function nearly vanishes for both the spectroscopic noise and the signal. We
analyze this near 'zero noise' outcome in detail to argue it might be possible
to detect neutrinos of mass range $m_\nu \simeq 0.05 \hbox{--}0.1 \, \rm eV$
with signal-to-noise of unity with a single QSO line of sight. We show that
this estimate can be improved to SNR $\simeq 3\hbox{--}6$ with data along
multiple line of sights within the redshift range $z \simeq 2 \hbox{--} 2.5$.
Such data sets already exist in the literature. We further carry out principal
component analysis of the Fisher matrix to study the degeneracies of the
neutrino mass with other parameters. We show that Planck priors lift the
degeneracies between the neutrino mass and other cosmological parameters.
However, the prospects of the detection of neutrino mass are driven by the
poorly-determined parameters characterizing the ionization and thermal state of
Lyman-$\alpha$ clouds. We have also mentioned the possible limitations and
observational challenges posed in measuring the neutrino mass using our method.
