Detecting the radiative decay of the cosmic neutrino background with line-intensity mapping

Abstract

We study the possibility to use line-intensity mapping (LIM) to seek photons from the radiative decay of neutrinos in the cosmic neutrino background. The Standard Model prediction for the rate for these decays is extremely small, but it can be enhanced if new physics increases the neutrino electromagnetic moments. The decay photons will appear as an interloper of astrophysical spectral lines. We propose that the neutrino-decay line can be identified with anisotropies in LIM clustering and also with the voxel intensity distribution. Ongoing and future LIM experiments will have -- depending on the neutrino hierarchy, transition and experiment considered -- a sensitivity to an effective electromagnetic transition moment $\sim 10^{-12}-10^{-8}(m_i{c}^2/0.1\mathrm{eV}{)}^{3/2}{\mu }_{\mathrm{B}}$, where $m_i$ is the mass of the decaying neutrino and ${\mu }_{\mathrm{B}}$ is the Bohr magneton. This will be significantly more sensitive than cosmic microwave background spectral distortions, and it will be competitive with stellar cooling studies. As a byproduct, we also report an analytic form of the one-point probability distribution function for neutrino-density fluctuations, obtained from the Quijote simulations using symbolic regression.

Version published in PRL

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Cited by in corpus (23)

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• The GIGANTES dataset: precision cosmology from voids in the machine learning era
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• Limits on the cosmic neutrino background
• Neutrino Properties with Ground-Based Millimeter-Wavelength Line Intensity Mapping
• Precision Tests of CO and [CII] Power Spectra Models against Simulated Intensity Maps
• Euclid preparation. Sensitivity to neutrino parameters
• Augmenting astrophysical scaling relations with machine learning: application to reducing the Sunyaev-Zeldovich flux-mass scatter
• The SZ flux-mass ($Y$-$M$) relation at low halo masses: improvements with symbolic regression and strong constraints on baryonic feedback
• Intensity mapping from the sky: synergizing the joint potential of [OIII] and [CII] surveys at reionization
• Revisiting the impact of neutrino mass hierarchies on neutrino mass constraints in light of recent DESI data
• Neutrino capture on tritium as a probe of flavor vacuum condensate and dark matter
• Seeking dark matter with $\gamma$-ray attenuation
• A multi-tracer empirically-driven approach to line-intensity mapping lightcones
• Characteristic Functions for Cosmological Cross-Correlations
• Impact of the cosmic neutrino background on black hole superradiance
• Towards Accurate Modeling of Line-Intensity Mapping One-Point Statistics: Including Extended Profiles
• PTOLEMY's test of generalized neutrino interactions: unveiling challenges and constraints
• Machine Learning-Based Analytical Expressions for Gray-Body Factors and Application to Primordial Black Holes
• Upcoming searches for decaying dark matter with ULTRASAT ultraviolet maps
• Removal of interloper contamination to line-intensity maps using correlations with ancillary tracers of the large-scale structure
• Spatially resolved stellar-to-total dynamical mass relation: Radial variations, gradients and profiles of galaxy stellar populations