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Boomerang mechanism explaining the excess radio background

P. S. Bhupal Dev1,*, Pasquale Di Bari2,†, Ivan Martinez-Soler3,‡, and Rishav Roshan2,§

  • 1Department of Physics and McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri 63130, USA
  • 2School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom
  • 3Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom

  • *Contact author: bdev@wustl.edu
  • †Contact author: P.Di-Bari@soton.ac.uk
  • ‡Contact author: ivan.j.martinez-soler@durham.ac.uk
  • §Contact author: r.roshan@soton.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 123513 – Published 8 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ncv3-jtnp

Abstract

We propose a boomerang mechanism for the explanation of the excess radio background detected by ARCADE 2. In an early stage of the Universe, at a temperature T in the range ∼0.1  keV−1  MeV, a fraction of relic neutrinos is resonantly converted into dark neutrinos by mixing induced by a preexisting lepton asymmetry. Dark neutrinos decay much later into a dark-standard photon state and a dark fermion, with a lifetime longer than the age of the Universe, as required by a solution to the excess radio background. This scenario circumvents the upper bound on the neutrino magnetic moment but still implies a testable lower bound.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 123513– Published 8 June, 2026
  • Received 23 September 2025
  • Accepted 21 April 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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