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Particles and interactions

Particles and interactions

Neutrinos for geophysics

16 Feb 2005 Isabelle Dumé

A physicist in the US has proposed using a beam of neutrinos to measure the density of the Earth's core. Walter Winter of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton says that neutrinos could provide information about the Earth that is not available with other techniques (arXiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0502097). Although measurements of the seismic waves produced by earthquakes can be used to reconstruct a profile of the Earth's interior, they provide only indirect information.

Figure 1
Neutrinos come in three flavours — electron, muon and tau neutrino. They are also electrically

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