Earth Tomography with ICAL at INO

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the ICAL detector's potential for Earth tomography by analyzing its sensitivity to matter effects in atmospheric neutrinos, emphasizing its unique charge-identification capability and impact on understanding Earth's density structure.

Contribution

It demonstrates ICAL's competitive sensitivity to Earth's density profile, especially for inverted mass ordering, leveraging its charge-identification and matter effect detection capabilities.

Findings

ICAL can distinguish matter effects in neutrinos and antineutrinos.

ICAL's sensitivity to Earth tomography is comparable or superior to other experiments.

Inclusion of Earth's mass and hydrostatic constraints enhances ICAL's tomography sensitivity.

Abstract

Observing matter effects in atmospheric neutrinos travelling through the entire mantle and core of the Earth is a promising way of enhancing our understanding of Earth's density structure. In that context we study the prospects of Earth tomography with the ICAL detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory. While this experiment is smaller in size in comparison to some of the other bigger detectors being proposed, it is the only neutrino experiment with charge-identification sensitivity. In particular, ICAL can see matter effects separately in neutrinos and antineutrinos. This has been seen to enhance ICAL's sensitivity to earth matter effects and hence the mass ordering sensitivity for both normal and inverted mass orderings. It is therefore, pertinent to see if the ICAL sensitivity to earth tomography is competitive or better with respect to other experiments, especially for the inverted mass ordering, where other experiments suffer reduced sensitivity. We present the sensitivity of ICAL to earth tomography by taking into consideration both the Earth's mass constraint as well as the hydrostatic equilibrium constraints.