Abstract
Neutrinos have two properties that make them fairly unique from other known particles: extremely low cross sections and flavor changing oscillations. With a good knowledge of the oscillation parameters soon in hand, it will become possible to detect low-energy atmospheric neutrinos sensitive to the forward elastic scattering off electrons in the Earth's core providing a measurement of the core properties and the matter effect itself. As the dynamics of the Earth's core are complicated and in a difficult to probe environment, additional information from upcoming neutrino experiments will provide feedback into our knowledge of geophysics as well as useful information about exoplanet formation and various new physics scenarios including dark matter. In addition, we can probe the existence of the matter effect in the Earth and constrain the non-standard neutrino interaction parameter $\epsilon_{ee}^\oplus$. We show how DUNE's sensitivity to low-energy atmospheric neutrino oscillations can provide a novel constraint on the density and radius of the Earth's core at the 9\% level and the Earth's matter effect at the 5\% level. Finally, we illuminate the physics behind low-energy atmospheric neutrino resonances in the Earth.
Highlights
Even as we are still measuring the remaining known neutrino parameters, neutrinos provide a unique window into difficult to probe environments
We find that DUNE can determine the radius of the core to ∼9% precision (∼300 km which is comparable to the size of the D” layer between the mantle and the core) at 1σ
We investigated whether or not DUNE can determine the existence of the matter effect in the Earth—
Summary
Even as we are still measuring the remaining known neutrino parameters, neutrinos provide a unique window into difficult to probe environments. Because of their extremely small cross sections, neutrinos provide crucial information about the Sun [1,2], supernova [3,4,5,6,7,8], nuclear processes within the Earth [9,10,11], nuclear reactors [12], and the big bang [13,14,15,16,17] making neutrinos an excellent means of extracting information from dense and difficult to access environments While their cross sections are quite low, at high energies (TeV–PeV), neutrinos begin to become absorbed in the Earth. We show how the Earth’s matter effect can be measured with atmospheric neutrinos at DUNE, and in the Appendix, we elucidate several features of resonant oscillations
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