Relic Antineutrino Capture on 163-Ho decaying Nuclei

Abstract

The electron capture decay of the isotope 163-Ho has been proposed since a long time as a candidate for measuring the electron neutrino mass and recently the interest on this idea has been renewed. In this paper we note that a direct observation of the cosmic antineutrino background could be made using a target made of this isotope. We further discuss the requests for an experiment aiming to obtain this result.

Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures. Minor modifications. Further discussion and references added. Accepted for publication in Physics Letters B