Radiography of Earth’s Core and Mantle with Atmospheric Neutrinos

A measurement of the absorption of neutrinos with energies in excess of 10 TeV when traversing the Earth is capable of revealing its density distribution. Unfortunately, the existence of beams with sufficient luminosity for the task has been ruled out by the AMANDA South Pole neutrino telescope. In this Letter we point out that, with the advent of second-generation kilometer-scale neutrino detectors, the idea of studying the internal structure of Earth may be revived using atmospheric neutrinos instead.

Figure 1

(a) Expected zenith angle distribution of ATM ${\nu }_{\mu }$ induced events in IceCube for different energy thresholds $E_{\mu }^{\mathrm{fin},\min }$ for the PREM. $\theta$ is the neutrino angle (which at these energies is collinear with the detected muon) as measured from the vertical direction (upgoing-$\nu$ corresponding to $\theta =180$). (b) Ratio of the zenith angle distribution of ATM ${\nu }_{\mu }$ induced events in IceCube for different energy thresholds $E_{\mu }^{\mathrm{fin},\min }$ over the corresponding one for L2 cuts only. The shadow areas cover the angular size of the Earth’s core.

Figure 2

Ratio of zenith angle distribution of expected events for the PREM over the expectations with an homogeneous Earth matter distribution for different values of the energy threshold of the events. The error bars in the figure show the expected statistical error in 10 years of IceCube.