The possibilities of the use of the moon as a base for conducting neutrino physics are examined, exphasizing neutrino astronomy. The principle advantage of the moon for this research is freedom from the atmospheric layer of the earth: cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere generate a rather copious source of neutrinos, which are a terrestrially inescapable diffuse background to neutrino astronomy. The cosmic ray generated neutrinos on earth are also a limiting background for other sensitive particle physics experiments, typically those performed underground.
The most severe limitation of conducting this type of physics research on the moon seems to be the pragmatic one of mass transport to the moon: many of the immediately obvious research initiatives which could benefit from lower backgrounds than possible on earth (e.g., proton decay searches, low energy neutrino experiments) involve massive (megaton size) detectors. These experiments will thus not be practical until substantial manufacturing capability exists on the moon.
We do however identify two very different prospects for neutrino astronomy, in very different energy regions, which are worths of more immediate study: 1) a 1 km2 detector using the moon as the cosmic ray shield and the target for TeV neutrinos, an which observes the product muons emerging from the surface: and 2) more speculatively, and EeV detector employing acoustic detection to probe an otherwise inaccessible energy domain using the entire moon’s core as the target. It is suggested that the first detector might perform experiments detecting a neutrino beam generated by a terrestrial accelerator, such as the SSC, permitting an interesting exploration of muon neutrino oscillations.
Several followup initiatives are suggested on low mass planar detector and on lunar acoustic properties. It seems possible that the future of very high energy neutrino sastronomy is on the moon.
