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.
Matthias Finger, Qian Wang, Yiming Li, Varun Sharma, Konstantin Androsov, Jan Steggemann, Xin Chen, Rakesh Chawla, Matteo Galli, Jian Wang, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Tagir Aushev, Matthias Wolf, Yi Zhang, Tian Cheng, Yixing Chen, Werner Lustermann, Andromachi Tsirou, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Andrea Rizzi, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Paolo Ronchese, Hua Zhang, Siyuan Wang, Tao Huang, David Vannerom, Michele Bianco, Sebastiana Gianì, Sun Hee Kim, Kun Shi, Abhisek Datta, Federica Legger, Gabriele Grosso, Anna Mascellani, Ji Hyun Kim, Donghyun Kim, Zheng Wang, Sanjeev Kumar, Wei Li, Yong Yang, Ajay Kumar, Ashish Sharma, Georgios Anagnostou, Joao Varela, Csaba Hajdu, Muhammad Ahmad, Ioannis Evangelou, Milos Dordevic, Meng Xiao, Sourav Sen, Xiao Wang, Kai Yi, Jing Li, Rajat Gupta, Hui Wang, Seungkyu Ha, Pratyush Das, Anton Petrov, Xin Sun, Valérie Scheurer, Muhammad Ansar Iqbal, Lukas Layer
Yiming Li, Frédéric Courbin, Georges Meylan, Yi Wang, Richard Massey, Fabio Finelli, Marcello Farina
Frédéric Courbin, Georges Meylan, Gianluca Castignani, Maurizio Martinelli, Malte Tewes, Slobodan Ilic, Alessandro Pezzotta, Yi Wang, Richard Massey, Fabio Finelli, Marcello Farina