| MadSci Network: Physics |
Dear Romel, This is an excellent and timely question. You ask if neutrinos can be used to "x-ray" the earth, and if the information we would gain from this would be useful in predicting earthquakes. The answer, I'm afraid, is no. The very property that makes neutrinos so interesting-- their ability to pass through kilometers of solid rock without interacting-- makes them very hard to measure. The best-known neutrono detector, Super Kamiokanda in Japan, weighs 50,000 tons and only measures a few hundred neutrinos per year. Their most recent paper uses 1489 events that were collected over several years. This is just too small a sample to provide any information about the interior of the earth. It would take hundreds of such neutrino detectors decades to collect enough information to be useful. Scientists do have other ways of locating and observing geological plates and stresses. On land, small underground explosions are set off, and, by watching the patterns of shock waves in the surrounding ground, they can determine what is happening beneath them. As you might imagine, this technique doesn't work quite as well under water-- mainly due to the difficulty of accessing the seabed. By the way-- if you can invent a neutrino detector that would collect enough data to accomplish what you propose, you will be famous and will earn a Nobel Prize. There are millions of neutrinos passing through the Earth every second. We just can't see them. Find a way to do that, and the scientific world will beat a path to your door! Hope this helps...
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