New Physics Decaying into Metastable Particles: Impact on Cosmic Neutrinos

We investigate decays of hypothetical unstable new physics particles into metastable species such as muons, pions, or kaons in the early Universe, when temperatures are in the MeV range, and study how they affect cosmic neutrinos. We demonstrate that the nontrivial dynamics of metastables in the plasma alters the impact of the new physics particles on the neutrino population, including the effective number of neutrino degrees of freedom, Neff, modifies neutrino spectral distortions, and may induce asymmetries in neutrino and antineutrino energy distributions. These modifications have important implications for observables such as big bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background, especially in light of upcoming cosmic microwave background observations aiming to reach percent-level precision on Neff. We illustrate our findings with a few examples of new physics particles and provide a computational tool available for further exploration. Published by the American Physical Society 2025