This is a brief introduction to start the conference. I will introduce geoneutrinos and the geoscience motivation for studying them. I will highlight upcoming talks in this conference, drawing attention to current experiments and future objectives in this field.
KamLAND, Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Anti-neutrino Detector (Japan), utilizes 1 kton liquid scintillator and reported the first experimental study of geo-neutrino in 2005. In 2011, KamLAND geo-neutrino measurement results were used to estimate the Earth's radiogenic heat production and constrain composition models of the bulk silicate Earth (BSE). Following the Fukushima reactor accident in...
Borexino is a 280-ton liquid scintillator detector located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), Italy and is one of the two detectors that has measured geoneutrinos so far. The unprecedented radio-purity of the scintillator, the shielding with higly purified water, and the placement of the detector at a 3800 m w.e. depth have resulted in very low background levels and has made...
Although many assume we know the Earth's abundance and distribution of radioactive heat producing elements (i.e., U, Th, and K), estimates for mantle's heat production varying by an order of magnitude and recent physics findings challenge our dominant paradigm. Geologist predict the Earth's budget of radiogenic power at 20$\pm$10 TW (terrawatts, 10$^{12}$ watts), whereas the physics...
The coupled system of convection of the solid, rocky mantle of the Earth and plate tectonics is the main driver of long-term Earth evolution, being responsible for continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes, crustal building, mountain building, heat loss from the core that drives the geodynamo, and outgassing/ingassing of volatiles to/from the atmosphere (particularly CO2 and water). The Earth...
The deep-sea neutrino detector KM3NeT/ORCA, currently being built in the Mediterranean Sea near Toulon (France), is optimized for the study of oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos in the few-GeV energy range, with the main goal to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. This is possible due to matter effects that modify the probability of neutrino oscillations along their path through the...
Reactor antineutrinos are a major source of background in geoneutrino detection. The precise knowledge of their rate and the shape of the energy spectrum is crucial for unbiased geoneutrino flux measurement. In this talk, I will review the current theoretical and experimental knowledge of reactor antineutrino flux and spectrum, with a focus on the most recent results from the Daya Bay experiment.
Geoneutrino observations, first achieved by KamLAND in 2005 and followed by Borexino in 2010, have accumulated statistics and improved sensitivity for more than ten years. The uncertainty of the geoneutrino flux at the surface is now reduced to a level small enough to set useful constraints on U and Th abundances in the bulk silicate earth (BSE). However, in order to make inferences on earth’s...
Following two talks on construction of stochastic crustal model, one by Takeuchi et al. focusing on Bayesian inference of lithology model and one by Ueki / Iizuka et al. focusing on bias-free composition model, we will discuss geoneutrino flux calculation using those models. As commonly done, Monte-Carlo integration was performed here, but we found that proper correlation modeling is necessary...
The talk will provide overall insight to the research in the neutrino physics field carried on by the institutions in the Czech republic. It will cover various experiments starting with the neutrino oscillation on accelerators and nuclear reactors, respectively.The NOvA, DUNE, Daya Bay and JUNE experiments will be described. Furthermore it will be discussed the Katrin experiment for the direct...
Borexino is a 280-ton liquid scintillator detector located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), Italy. It measures antineutrinos via the Inverse Beta Decay reaction and is one of the two detectors that has measured geoneutrinos so far. The updated statistics and the improved analysis techniques have led to a precision of around 18%. The new analysis adopts an enlarged fiducial...
The deep structure and its density of South China block and the north margin of the South China Sea is important to understand the regional tectonic evolution and interaction of continent and oceanic plate. The density structures also provide the basic parameters for geoneutrino flux estimation in Jiangmen, China. Based on the gravity data, we inverse the 3D density structure and give the...
The SNO+ detector is designed to achieve several fundamental physics goals as a low-background experiment, particularly measuring the Earth’s geoneutrino flux. The detector is located at SNOLAB, one of the deepest underground laboratories in the world with an overburden of 2092 m. The goeneutrino signal from originated from the 50 × 50 km upper crust surrounding the detector is estimated...
Borexino is a 280-ton liquid scintillator detector located at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (Italy) measuring geoneutrinos from 238U and 232Th decay chains through inverse beta decay of free proton. The improved geoneutrino analysis of some 3263 days of data, taken by Borexino between December 2007 and April 2019, is candidate to provide useful insights into the composition of the...
Geoneutrinos bring unique and direct information on the Earth’s composition, which relate to the fundamental mysteries of its heat balance and thermal evolution. To date, we have set limits on the global flux of geo-neutrino that has in turned constrained the range of acceptable models for the Earth’s composition, but distinguishing the mantle flux by current detectors, which are all locate on...
Atmospheric neutrinos open the way to alternative probing methods to study the structure and composition of the inner Earth, complementary to geophysical methods. At GeV energies, the flavour oscillations of neutrinos crossing the Earth are distorted due to coherent forward scattering on electrons along their path. The signature of these matter effects in the neutrino angular, energy
and...
SNO+ is a multipurpose, low background, liquid scintillator neutrino detector. It is located 2km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada. It is currently being filled with 800 tonnes of liquid scintillator, after the successful completion of the water phase of the experiment. Once the detector is filled, studies into several physics topics will begin, including reactor antineutrinos and...
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multipurpose experiment currently under construction at an equal distance of 53 km from two nuclear power plant complexes in southern China, Yangjian and Taishan, with foreseen start of data taking in 2021. The experiment will primarily study reactor antineutrino oscillations with the goal of determining the neutrino mass hierarchy at...
China Jinping underground laboratory is an ideal place for geoneutrino observation. No nuclear reactors are within 1000km, making the geoneutrino signal-to-noise ratio to be more than 5:1. The site is on the corner of the world's thickest crust, tibet plateau, giving more statistics to pin down Th/U ratio by neutrinos.
With 4500 kton-day exposure, more than 500 geoneutrinos will be...
Significant progress has been made in our understanding of Earth’s formation, composition, and dynamical evolution, however, many first-order problems remain to be solved. In this overview talk I will recap our current view on Earth’s history, from the collapse of the solar system’s parental molecular cloud core to the emergence of a habitable planet. Along the way I will introduce key...
A new neutrino program has been recently lunched at Baksan Neutrino Observatory. It is planned to deploy a 10-kiloton scale detector based on liquid scintillator in the existing shaft at a depth of 4800 m.w.e.. Baksan underground laboratory is profitable in terms of low reactor neutrino flux and well measured backgrounds originating from natural radioactivity. Therefore, the experiment is well...
Active source seismology provides a critical constraint on the global crustal structure. However, the heterogeneous data coverage means that interpolation is necessary to fill the gap between seismic profiles. This has the potential to cause large uncertainties especially if the data are interpolated over a large distance. In previous models, geological intuition was often employed to ensure...
Conventional methods of seismic tomography, topography and gravity data analysis constrain distributions of seismic velocity and density at depth, all depending on temperature and composition of the rocks within the Earth. However, modelling and interpretation of multiple data sets provide a multifaceted image of the true thermochemical structure of the Earth that needs to be appropriately and...
Geoneutrino signal measured by a liquid scintillator detector placed on the continental crust is dominated by the natural radioactivity of the closest geological units, which can be modelled by gravimetric methods. In particular, recent satellite missions have provided the scientific community with highly accurate and homogeneously distributed gravimetric data, offering an extraordinary...
Geophysical models are combined with geochemical datasets to predict the geoneutrino signal at current and future geoneutrino detectors. We propagated uncertainties, both chemical and physical, through Monte Carlo methods. Estimated total signal uncertainties are on the order of $\sim$20%, proportionally with geophysical and geochemical inputs contributing $\sim$30% and $\sim$70%,...
Calculations of the expected lithospheric contribution to the geoneutrino signal are essential for understanding the radiogenic power of the mantle. The density structure and distribution of heat producing elements (HPEs) and their uncertainties in the deep crust must be modeled in order to interpret Earth’s U and Th abundances. Such calculations prove challenging because the deep crust is...
The liquid scintillator detectors have the sensitivity for measuring total amount of geo-neutrinos from the Earth’s crust and mantle. However, we do not have the technology to track the direction of incoming geo-neutrinos at present due to the high miss-identification in a neutrino’s track reconstruction. The direction- sensitive detector can map out the U and Th distribution inside the Earth...
A fundamental goal in deep Earth geophysics is to explain the existence of the geomagnetic field for at least the past 3.5 billion years. The field is thought to be generated by turbulent motion of the liquid iron core and so there must have been sufficient power available to keep this dynamo process operating over most of Earth's history. Power is made available to the dynamo as heat is...
Potassium, K, element is volatile, and its precipitation is not the same as refractory U and Th elements in the Earth. A measurement of the K elements in the Earth is of interest to understand the chemical evolution of the Earth. Furthermore, the discussion on the Ar40-K40 system of the air, and the crust and upper mantle is one of the supports for the depleted and enriched two-layer mantle...
From 25% to 70% of Earth’s internal heat budget is deemed to be generated by the radioactive decays of the so-called heat producing elements (i.e. U, Th and K). Potassium, the only semi-volatile element among them, seems to show from 10% to 30% of its expected chondritic abundance, making thus uncertain any heat balance estimation. Two theories stand on the possible fate of “missing K”: i)...
Earth crust, enriched in heat producing elements such as U and Th, has been recycling into the mantle. Particular models envisage the material to sink deep to the core mantle boundary and form seismically observed Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces. Other models propose erosion and transport of continental crustal material by subduction, which could lead to the assembling of upper crustal...
