Cosmic neutrino background search experiments as decaying dark matter detectors

Understand

We investigate the possibility that particles that are long-lived on cosmological scales, making up part or all of the dark matter, decay to neutrinos that have present-day energies around an eV.

• The neutrinos from these decays can potentially be visible at experiments that hope to directly observe the cosmic neutrino background through neutrino capture on tritium, such as PTOLEMY.
• In the context of a simple model that can realize such decays, we discuss the allowed signatures at a PTOLEMY-like experiment given current cosmological constraints.