DUNE atmospheric neutrinos: Earth Tomography

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the DUNE experiment can utilize atmospheric neutrino oscillations to measure Earth's density profile, including core and mantle densities, with significant precision through detailed simulations and event reconstruction capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for Earth tomography using atmospheric neutrinos at DUNE, leveraging liquid argon detector technology and detailed oscillation analysis.

Findings

DUNE can measure Earth's total mass with 8.4% precision.

Core and mantle densities can be determined with 8.8%, 13%, and 22% precision.

A low exposure run could measure core density at ~30% precision.

Abstract

In this paper we show that the DUNE experiment can measure the Earth's density profile by analyzing atmospheric neutrino oscillations. The crucial feature that enables such measurement is the detailed event reconstruction capability of liquid argon time projection chambers. This allows for studying the sub-GeV atmospheric neutrino component, which bears a rich oscillation phenomenology, strongly dependent on the matter potential sourced by the Earth. We provide a pedagogical discussion of the MSW and parametric resonances and their role in measuring the core and mantle densities. By performing a detailed simulation, accounting for particle reconstruction at DUNE, nuclear physics effects relevant to neutrino-argon interactions and several uncertainties on the atmospheric neutrino flux, we manage to obtain a robust estimate of DUNE's sensitivity to the Earth matter profile. We find that DUNE can measure the total mass of the Earth at 8.4% precision with an exposure of 400~kton-year. By accounting for previous measurements of the total mass and moment of inertia of the Earth, the core, lower mantle and upper mantle densities can be determined with 8.8%, 13% and 22% precision, respectively, for the same exposure. Finally, DUNE could take atmospheric neutrino data while the beam is being commissioned and far detector modules are up and running. For a low exposure run of 60~kton-year, which would correspond to two far detectors running for three years, we have found that the core density could be measured by DUNE at $\sim30\%$ precision.