Abstract
The interior of Earth’s core can be explored using weak interactions of atmospheric neutrinos. This would complement gravitational and seismic measurements, paving the way for multimessenger tomography of Earth. Oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos passing through Earth are affected by the ambient electron density. We demonstrate that atmospheric neutrinos can probe the possible existence of dark matter inside Earth’s core in a unique way—by measuring the amount of baryonic matter using neutrino oscillations. We find that a detector like ICAL at INO with muon charge identification capability can be sensitive to dark matter with mass of Earth, at level with 500 kt yr exposure. We show that, while it will not be possible to identify the dark matter profile using neutrino oscillation experiments, the baryonic matter profile inside the core can be probed with atmospheric neutrinos.
- Received 27 January 2022
- Revised 22 April 2023
- Accepted 17 May 2023
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.115030
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society