Neutrinos Could Probe Earth’s Structure

This is certainly an ambitious proposal, but not that outrageous in terms of implementation.

A group of physicists have proposed to use the atmospheric neutrinos to study the structure of our Earth.

Now, Concepcion Gonzalez-Garcia from the University of Barcelona in Spain and colleagues say that atmospheric neutrinos may have been dismissed too hastily. Their calculations show that, although the proportion of atmospheric neutrinos above the 10 TeV absorption criterion is low, the sheer number of them could make up for it (arXiv:0711.0745). “It would be better to have a localized beam rather than a disperse one, but the point is that there is no such localized beam in nature that is intense enough,” Gonzalez-Garcia told physicsworld.com.

They hope to detect these few events at IceCube, the neutrino detector project at the South Pole.

It sounds daunting, but who knows.

Zz.