When the Dark Matter mass is below the eV-scale, its cosmological occupation number exceeds the ones of photons from the cosmic microwave background as well as of relic neutrinos. If such Dark Matter decays to pairs of neutrinos, it implies that experiments that seek the detection of the cosmic neutrino background may as well be sensitive to this additional form of "dark radiation". Here we study the prospects for detection taking into account various options for the forecasted performance of the future PTOLEMY experiment. From a detailed profile likelihood analysis we find that Dark Matter decays with lifetime as large as 10(4) Gyr or a sub-% Dark Matter fraction decaying today can be discovered. The prospects are facilitated by the distinct spectral event shape that is introduced from galactic and cosmological neutrino dark radiation fluxes. In the process we also clarify the importance of Pauli-blocking in the Dark Matter decay. The scenarios presented in this work can be considered early physics targets in the development of these instruments with relaxed demands on performance and energy resolution.
Georges Meylan, Frédéric Courbin, Fabio Finelli, Richard Massey, Marcello Farina, Yiming Li, Yi Wang
Rakesh Chawla, Andrea Rizzi, Matthias Finger, Federica Legger, Matteo Galli, Sun Hee Kim, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Tagir Aushev, Hua Zhang, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Yixing Chen, Tian Cheng, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Gabriele Grosso, Valérie Scheurer, Meng Xiao, Qian Wang, Michele Bianco, Varun Sharma, Joao Varela, Sourav Sen, Ashish Sharma, Seungkyu Ha, David Vannerom, Csaba Hajdu, Sanjeev Kumar, Sebastiana Gianì, Kun Shi, Abhisek Datta, Siyuan Wang, Anton Petrov, Jian Wang, Yi Zhang, Muhammad Ansar Iqbal, Yong Yang, Xin Sun, Muhammad Ahmad, Donghyun Kim, Matthias Wolf, Anna Mascellani, Paolo Ronchese, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Slobodan Ilic, Malte Tewes, Georges Meylan, Frédéric Courbin, Fabio Finelli, Richard Massey, Maurizio Martinelli, Alessandro Pezzotta, Gianluca Castignani, Marcello Farina, Yi Wang