"Evaporation" of a flavor-mixed particle from a gravitational potential

Abstract

We demonstrate that a stable particle with flavor mixing, confined in a gravitational potential can gradually and irreversibly escape -- or "evaporate" -- from it. This effect is due to mass eigenstate conversions which occur in interactions (scattering) of mass states with other particles even when the energy exchange between them is vanishing. The evaporation and conversion are quantum effects not related to flavor oscillations, particle decay, quantum tunneling or other well-known processes. Apart from their profound academic interest, these effects should have tremendous implications for cosmology, e.g., (1) the cosmic neutrino background distortion is predicted and (2) the softening of central cusps in dark matter halos and smearing out or destruction of dwarf halos were suggested.

8 pages, 1 figure

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• A Theory of Dark Matter
• Can the flyby anomaly be attributed to earth-bound dark matter?
• Cosmology and Neutrino Properties

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• Structure Formation under Inelastic Two-Component Dark Matter: Halo Statistics and Matter Power Spectra in the High-$z$ Universe