Discriminating among Earth composition models using geo-antineutrinos

Abstract

It has been estimated that the entire Earth generates heat corresponding to about 40 TW (equivalent to 10,000 nuclear power plants) which is considered to originate mainly from the radioactive decay of elements like U, Th and K, deposited in the crust and mantle of the Earth. Radioactivity of these elements produce not only heat but also antineutrinos (called geo-antineutrinos) which can be observed by terrestrial detectors. We investigate the possibility of discriminating among Earth composition models predicting different total radiogenic heat generation, by observing such geo-antineutrinos at Kamioka and Gran Sasso, assuming KamLAND and Borexino (type) detectors, respectively, at these places. By simulating the future geo-antineutrino data as well as reactor antineutrino background contributions, we try to establish to which extent we can discriminate among Earth composition models for given exposures (in units of kt$\cdot$ yr) at these two sites on our planet. We use also information on neutrino mixing parameters coming from solar neutrino data as well as KamLAND reactor antineutrino data, in order to estimate the number of geo-antineutrino induced events.

24 pages, 10 figures, final version to appear in JHEP

References in corpus (5)

• First Results from KamLAND: Evidence for Reactor Anti-Neutrino Disappearance
• Exploring the sensitivity of current and future experiments to ${\theta }_{\odot }$
• Determining the oscillation parameters by Solar neutrinos and KamLAND
• KamLAND, terrestrial heat sources and neutrino oscillations
• Neutrinos and Energetics of the Earth

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Status of global fits to neutrino oscillations
• High Precision Measurements of ${\theta }_{\odot }$ in Solar and Reactor Neutrino Experiments
• Reactor Measurement of theta_12; Principles, Accuracies and Physics Potentials
• How much Uranium is in the Earth? Predictions for geo-neutrinos at KamLAND
• Potential of a Neutrino Detector in the ANDES Underground Laboratory for Geophysics and Astrophysics of Neutrinos
• Search for electron antineutrino interactions with the Borexino Counting Test Facility at Gran Sasso
• Imaging the Earth's Interior: the Angular Distribution of Terrestrial Neutrinos
• Geo-Neutrinos: a short review
• Non-negligible Oscillation Effects in the Crustal Geo-neutrino Calculations
• Physics of Massive Neutrinos
• Neutrino oscillations and new physics