Earth tomography with the ICAL detector at INO

Abstract

Observing matter effects in atmospheric neutrinos traveling 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 larger detectors being proposed, it is the only planned 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. Published by the American Physical Society 2024