Spectrometry of the Earth using Neutrino Oscillations

TL;DR

This paper proposes using neutrino oscillation measurements from large detectors to analyze Earth's interior composition, offering a novel approach to geophysical exploration beyond seismic methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new method combining neutrino oscillation data with seismic measurements to distinguish between different models of Earth's outer core composition.

Findings

Next-generation neutrino detectors can reject models with high hydrogen content.

Neutrino oscillation data can differentiate between specific Earth composition models.

The method offers a new way to study Earth's inner structure beyond traditional seismic techniques.

Abstract

The unknown constituents of the interior of our home planet have provoked the human imagination and driven scientific exploration. We herein demonstrate that large neutrino detectors could be used in the near future to significantly improve our understanding of the Earth's inner chemical composition. Neutrinos, which are naturally produced in the atmosphere, traverse the Earth and undergo oscillations that depend on the Earth's electron density. The Earth's chemical composition can be determined by combining observations from large neutrino detectors with seismic measurements of the Earth's matter density. We present a method that will allow us to perform a measurement that can distinguish between composition models of the outer core. We show that the next-generation large-volume neutrino detectors can provide sufficient sensitivity to reject outer core models with large hydrogen content and thereby demonstrate the potential of this novel method. In the future, dedicated instruments could be capable of distinguishing between specific Earth composition models and thereby reshape our understanding of the inner Earth in previously unimagined ways.