Studying the Earth with Geoneutrinos

Abstract

Geo-neutrinos, electron antineutrinos from natural radioactive decays inside the Earth, bring to the surface unique information about our planet. The new techniques in neutrino detection opened a door into a completely new inter-disciplinary field of Neutrino Geoscience. We give here a broad geological introduction highlighting the points where the geo-neutrino measurements can give substantial new insights. The status-of-art of this field is overviewed, including a description of the latest experimental results from KamLAND and Borexino experiments and their first geological implications. We performed a new combined Borexino and KamLAND analysis in terms of the extraction of the mantle geo-neutrino signal and the limits on the Earth's radiogenic heat power. The perspectives and the future projects having geo-neutrinos among their scientific goals are also discussed.

22 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in Advances in High Energy Physics-Hindawi Publishing Corporation

References in corpus (7)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Global analysis of neutrino masses, mixings and phases: entering the era of leptonic CP violation searches
• Measurement of geo-neutrinos from 1353 days of Borexino
• Geophysical and geochemical constraints on geoneutrino fluxes from Earth's mantle
• Geo-neutrinos and Earth's interior
• Borexino calibrations: Hardware, Methods, and Results
• Combined analysis of KamLAND and Borexino neutrino signals from Th and U decays in the Earth's interior

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Fog on the horizon: a new definition of the neutrino floor for direct dark matter searches
• Grand Unified Neutrino Spectrum at Earth: Sources and Spectral Components
• Can we overcome the neutrino floor at high masses?
• Geoneutrinos in Large Direct Detection Experiments
• Geoneutrinos at Jinping: Flux prediction and oscillation analysis
• AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015