Earthquake Forecast via Neutrino Tomography at the DUNE Baseline

Abstract

We investigate the sensitivity of accelerator-based neutrino oscillations to localized electron-density enhancements associated with seismic fault zones along the Fermilab SURF baseline of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Motivated by the reactor antineutrino proposal of Wang, Chen, and Li, we model the anomaly as a uniform-density slab embedded in the surrounding crust and calculate exact three flavour oscillation probabilities using layer by layer evolution. Our results show that localized density enhancements can produce measurable variations in muon-to-electron appearance probabilities for both neutrinos and antineutrinos, with potentially significant relative effects. The predicted variations exhibit weak dependence on the leptonic CP violating phase, suggesting that time-differential measurements may help reduce uncertainties associated with the unknown CP phase. However, the event statistics required for a statistically significant detection substantially exceed those expected during a short-duration precursor interval. Consequently, detecting sufficiently persistent density anomalies may be possible under favourable conditions, whereas short-term earthquake forecasting is not feasible with the nominal DUNE configuration. Our findings establish a theoretical framework for exploring localized Earth-density perturbations through long-baseline neutrino oscillations.