Dark Matter Decaying into a Fermi Sea of Neutrinos

Understand

We study the possible decay of a coherently oscillating scalar field, interpreted as dark matter, into light fermions.

• Specifically, we consider a scalar field with sub-eV mass decaying into a Fermi sea of neutrinos.
• We recognize the similarity between our scenario and inflationary preheating where a coherently oscillating scalar field decays into standard model particles.
• Like the case of fermionic preheating, we find that Pauli blocking controls the dark matter decay into the neutrino sea.