This analysis finds heavy dark matter decays can enhance neutrino interactions, suggesting new observational opportunities for cosmic neutrino background properties.
We propose heavy decaying dark matter (DM) as a new probe of the cosmic neutrino background (C$ν$B). Heavy DM, with mass 10⁹ GeV, decaying into neutrinos can be a new source of ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos. Including this contribution along with the measured astrophysical and predicted cosmogenic neutrino fluxes, we study the scattering of UHE neutrinos with the C$ν$B via standard weak interactions mediated by the Z-boson. We solve the complete neutrino transport equation, taking into account both absorption and reinjection effects, to calculate the expected spectrum of UHE neutrino flux at future neutrino telescopes, such as IceCube-Gen2 Radio. We argue that such observations can be used to probe the C$ν$B properties, and in particular, local C$ν$B clustering. We find that, depending on the absolute neutrino mass and the DM mass and lifetime, a local C$ν$B overdensity 10⁶ can be probed at IceCube-Gen2 Radio within 10 years of data taking.
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Maitra et al. (2025) studied this question.
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