2020/02/19 by Zackaria Chacko, Abhish Dev, Peizhi Du +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmic neutrino background #Cosmology #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Galaxy #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino detector #Neutrino oscillation #Particle physics #Physics #Planck #Quantum mechanics #Redshift #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.103.043519
published as Phys. Rev. D 103, 043519 (2021) · 6 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2020/02/19 · openalex publication_date 2021/02/12 · arxiv updated 2021/02/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We explore the cosmological signals of theories in which the neutrinos decay into invisible dark radiation after becoming nonrelativistic. We show that, in this scenario, near-future large-scale structure measurements from the Euclid satellite, when combined with cosmic microwave background data from Planck, may allow an independent determination of both the lifetime of the neutrinos and the sum of their masses. These parameters can be independently determined, because the Euclid data will cover a range of redshifts, allowing the growth of structure over time to be tracked. If neutrinos are stable on cosmological timescales, these observations can improve the lower limit on the neutrino lifetime by 7 orders of magnitude, from O(10) to 2\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi108 yr (95% C.L.), without significantly affecting the measurement of neutrino mass. On the other hand, if neutrinos decay after becoming nonrelativistic but on timescales less than O(100) million years, these observations may allow not just the first measurement of the sum of neutrino masses, but also the determination of the neutrino lifetime from cosmology.