Impact of neutrino decays on the Cosmic Neutrino Background anisotropies

Abstract

The anisotropies of the Cosmic Neutrino Background (C$\nu$B) offer an ideal tool to test non-standard neutrino interactions, since they directly trace the perturbations in the neutrino distribution function. Here, we study how invisible neutrino decays impact the C$\nu$B anisotropies, in a framework where neutrinos decay non-relativistically to dark radiation and lighter neutrinos in a manner consistent with the measured mass splittings. For this purpose, we perform the first implementation of such a late-time neutrino decay scenario within a linear Einstein-Boltzmann solver, and compute the C$\nu$B angular power spectra from the Boltzmann hierarchy solutions for a range of lifetimes and decay channels. We find that neutrino decays leave very strong signatures on the C$\nu$B angular spectra, about two orders of magnitude larger than on the CMB angular spectra, particularly for lifetimes comparable to the age of the Universe. We show that a future polarized tritium target run of the PTOLEMY experiment, with sufficient counting statistics to measure just the first $\sim 15$ multipoles of the neutrino sky map, could test neutrino decay models that remain undetectable with CMB data.