2005/02/17 by Evgeny Akhmedov, E. Kh. Akhmedov, M. Tórtola +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph #hep-ex #hep-ph #physics.geo-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2005/06/053
published as JHEP 0506:053,2005 · 35 pages, 7 figures; minor textual changes in section 2
arxiv created 2005/02/17 · openalex publication_date 2005/06/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We show how by studying the Earth matter effect on oscillations of solar and supernova neutrinos inside the Earth one can in principle reconstruct the electron number density profile of the Earth. A direct inversion of the oscillation problem is possible due to the existence of a very simple analytic formula for the Earth matter effect on oscillations of solar and supernova neutrinos. From the point of view of the Earth tomography, these oscillations have a number of advantages over the oscillations of the accelerator or atmospheric neutrinos, which stem from the fact that solar and supernova neutrinos are coming to the Earth as mass eigenstates rather than flavour eigenstates. In particular, this allows reconstruction of density profiles even over relatively short neutrino path lengths in the Earth, and also of asymmetric profiles. We study the requirements that future experiments must meet to achieve a given accuracy of the tomography of the Earth.