TY - JOUR
T1 - Expected geoneutrino signal at JUNO
AU - Strati, Virginia
AU - Baldoncini, Marica
AU - Callegari, Ivan
AU - Mantovani, Fabio
AU - McDonough, William F.
AU - Ricci, Barbara
AU - Xhixha, Gerti
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to R. L. Rudnick and Y. Huang for their fruitful discussions on crustal modeling of geoneutrino fluxes. We appreciate the observations on the geoneutrino signal predictions from S. Dye, G. Fiorentini, L. Ludhova, and H. Watanabe. We thank J. Mandula for the valuable help in compiling the nuclear reactor database. We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful reviews. This work was partially supported by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) through the ITALRAD Project, by the University of Ferrara through the research initiative ‘Fondo di Ateneo per la Ricerca scientifica FAR 2014’ and partially by the U.S. National Science Foundation Grants EAR 1067983/1068097.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Strati et al.; licensee Springer.
PY - 2015/12/1
Y1 - 2015/12/1
N2 - Constraints on the Earth’s composition and on its radiogenic energy budget come from the detection of geoneutrinos. The Kamioka Liquid scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) and Borexino experiments recently reported the geoneutrino flux, which reflects the amount and distribution of U and Th inside the Earth. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) neutrino experiment, designed as a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector, will be built in an underground laboratory in South China about 53 km from the Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear power plants, each one having a planned thermal power of approximately 18 GW. Given the large detector mass and the intense reactor antineutrino flux, JUNO aims not only to collect high statistics antineutrino signals from reactors but also to address the challenge of discriminating the geoneutrino signal from the reactor background. The predicted geoneutrino signal at JUNO is 39.7−5.2+6.5 terrestrial neutrino unit (TNU), based on the existing reference Earth model, with the dominant source of uncertainty coming from the modeling of the compositional variability in the local upper crust that surrounds (out to approximately 500 km) the detector. A special focus is dedicated to the 6° × 4° local crust surrounding the detector which is estimated to contribute for the 44% of the signal. On the basis of a worldwide reference model for reactor antineutrinos, the ratio between reactor antineutrino and geoneutrino signals in the geoneutrino energy window is estimated to be 0.7 considering reactors operating in year 2013 and reaches a value of 8.9 by adding the contribution of the future nuclear power plants. In order to extract useful information about the mantle’s composition, a refinement of the abundance and distribution of U and Th in the local crust is required, with particular attention to the geochemical characterization of the accessible upper crust where 47% of the expected geoneutrino signal originates and this region contributes the major source of uncertainty.
AB - Constraints on the Earth’s composition and on its radiogenic energy budget come from the detection of geoneutrinos. The Kamioka Liquid scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) and Borexino experiments recently reported the geoneutrino flux, which reflects the amount and distribution of U and Th inside the Earth. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) neutrino experiment, designed as a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector, will be built in an underground laboratory in South China about 53 km from the Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear power plants, each one having a planned thermal power of approximately 18 GW. Given the large detector mass and the intense reactor antineutrino flux, JUNO aims not only to collect high statistics antineutrino signals from reactors but also to address the challenge of discriminating the geoneutrino signal from the reactor background. The predicted geoneutrino signal at JUNO is 39.7−5.2+6.5 terrestrial neutrino unit (TNU), based on the existing reference Earth model, with the dominant source of uncertainty coming from the modeling of the compositional variability in the local upper crust that surrounds (out to approximately 500 km) the detector. A special focus is dedicated to the 6° × 4° local crust surrounding the detector which is estimated to contribute for the 44% of the signal. On the basis of a worldwide reference model for reactor antineutrinos, the ratio between reactor antineutrino and geoneutrino signals in the geoneutrino energy window is estimated to be 0.7 considering reactors operating in year 2013 and reaches a value of 8.9 by adding the contribution of the future nuclear power plants. In order to extract useful information about the mantle’s composition, a refinement of the abundance and distribution of U and Th in the local crust is required, with particular attention to the geochemical characterization of the accessible upper crust where 47% of the expected geoneutrino signal originates and this region contributes the major source of uncertainty.
KW - Earth composition
KW - Earth reference model
KW - Geoneutrino flux
KW - Heat-producing elements
KW - JUNO experiment
KW - Reactor antineutrinos
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U2 - 10.1186/s40645-015-0037-6
DO - 10.1186/s40645-015-0037-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85007092203
SN - 2197-4284
VL - 2
JO - Progress in Earth and Planetary Science
JF - Progress in Earth and Planetary Science
IS - 1
M1 - 5
ER -