A Possible Detection of the Cosmic Antineutrino Background in the
  Presence of Flavor Effects
  Lusignoli and Vignati have recently pointed out that it is in principle
possible to directly detect the cosmic antineutrino background by using the
rather stable isotope holmium-163 as a target, which can decay into
dysprosium-163 via electron capture (EC) with a very small energy release. In
this paper we calculate the rate of the relic antineutrino capture on
holmium-163 nuclei against the corresponding EC decay rate by taking account of
different neutrino mass hierarchies and reasonable values of theta_13. We show
that such flavor effects are appreciable and even important in some cases, and
stress that a calorimetric measurement of the cosmic antineutrino background
might be feasible in the far future.
