Neutrino Oscillations: from Vacuum to the Earth’s Core
Mini-course · English · three lectures
Neutrino Oscillations: from Vacuum to the Earth's Core
Three lectures (about 2 h 45 min) for students of particle physics and geophysics. The emphasis is on understanding and on the size of the effects: why a neutrino changes flavor, why matter changes the clock, and how neutrinos can weigh the Earth, probe the electrons of its core and measure its radioactive heat. Interactive applets and animations accompany every step.
Lecture I A Quantum Clock in Vacuum
Ghost particles and the missing solar and atmospheric neutrinos; flavor and mass states; beats of two waves; the oscillation formula and its two knobs; oscillation lengths and the L/E map; three flavors and two clocks.
Lecture II Matter and the Sun
Refraction of neutrinos and the potential of electrons; the MSW resonance; slowly changing density; the Sun as a flavor converter; the day–night effect; how matter on long baselines reveals the neutrino mass ordering.
Lecture III The Earth Seen by Neutrinos
What seismology knows and what it cannot tell; electrons per nucleon; absorption tomography and the mass of the Earth; oscillation tomography of the core; geoneutrinos and the Earth's heat budget.
Applets Interactive material inside the lectures
Two-flavor laboratory, coupled pendulums, three-flavor triangle and probabilities (Lecture I); refraction layers, constant-density and adiabatic matter laboratories, long-baseline laboratory (Lecture II); a neutrino crossing the Earth, the Earth path explorer and the oscillogram laboratory (Lecture III). All calculations run in the browser.