Could dark matter decay solve the universe's growth crisis?

Measurements of how quickly the universe's matter clumped together disagree by 2–3 sigma—a persistent headache for cosmology. This work shows that if dark matter slowly decays into neutrinos and invisible fermions, it naturally weakens clustering at late times, making large-scale structure surveys agree with weak lensing data. Using real observations from the Dark Energy Survey, the authors demonstrate the decay channel produces precisely the damping needed to resolve the tension.