Study of Ocean Bottom Detector for observation of geo-neutrino from the mantle

Observation of anti-neutrinos emitted from radioactive isotopes inside Earth(geoneutrinos) brings direct information on the Earth's chemical composition and its heat balance, which strongly relate to the Earth's dynamics. To date, two experiments (KamLAND and Borexino) have measured geo-neutrinos and constrained the range of acceptable models for the Earth's chemical composition, but distinguishing the mantle flux by land-based detectors is challenging as the crust signal is about 70% of the total anti-neutrino flux. Given the oceanic crust is thinner and has lower concentration of radioactive elements than continental crust, geo-neutrino detector in the ocean, Ocean Bottom Detector (OBD), makes it sensitive to geo-neutrinos originating from the Earth's mantle. Our working group was jointly constructed from interdisciplinary communities in Japan which include particle physics, geoscience, and ocean engineering. We have started to work on technological developments of OBD. We are now developing a 20 kg prototype liquid scintillator detector. This detector will undergo operation deployment tests at 1 km depth seafloor in 2022.