Abstract
Geoneutrinos, 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 interdisciplinary field of neutrino geoscience. We give here a broad geological introduction highlighting the points where the geoneutrino 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.
Highlights
The newly born interdisciplinar field of neutrino geoscience takes the advantage of the technologies developed by largevolume neutrino experiments and of the achievements of the elementary particle physics in order to study the Earth interior with new probe geoneutrinos
Both Borexino [62] and Kamioka Liquid scintillator ANtineutrino Detector (KamLAND) [51] collaborations released new geoneutrino results in March 2013 and we describe them in more detail below
The KamLAND result is based on a total live-time of 2991 days, collected between March 2002 and November 2012
Summary
The newly born interdisciplinar field of neutrino geoscience takes the advantage of the technologies developed by largevolume neutrino experiments and of the achievements of the elementary particle physics in order to study the Earth interior with new probe geoneutrinos. It is, in principle, possible to extract from measured geoneutrino fluxes several geological information completely unreachable by other means This information concerns the total abundance and distribution of the HPE inside the Earth and the determination of the fraction of radiogenic heat contribute to the total surface heat flux. Such a knowledge is of critical importance for understanding complex processes such as the mantle convection, the plate tectonics, and the geodynamo (the process of generation of the Earth’s magnetic field), as well as the Earth formation itself. The Borexino and KamLAND collaborations are in strict contact with the International
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