AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015

TL;DR

The AGM2015 map models Earth's surface antineutrino flux, aiding geoscience, fundamental physics experiments, and nuclear monitoring by integrating experimental data with geophysical models.

Contribution

It provides the first open-source, experimentally informed global antineutrino flux map with systematic error assessment, combining geophysical models and measurements.

Findings

Earth's total antineutrino luminosity is approximately 3.4 x 10^{25} neutrinos per second.

Geo-neutrinos dominate the antineutrino flux, with roughly equal crust and mantle contributions.

About 1% of the flux originates from man-made nuclear reactors.

Abstract

Every second greater than $10^{25}$ antineutrinos radiate to space from Earth, shining like a faint antineutrino star. Underground antineutrino detectors have revealed the rapidly decaying fission products inside nuclear reactors, verified the long-lived radioactivity inside our planet, and informed sensitive experiments for probing fundamental physics. Mapping the anisotropic antineutrino flux and energy spectrum advance geoscience by defining the amount and distribution of radioactive power within Earth while critically evaluating competing compositional models of the planet. We present the Antineutrino Global Map 2015 (AGM2015), an experimentally informed model of Earth's surface antineutrino flux over the 0 to 11 MeV energy spectrum, along with an assessment of systematic errors. The open source AGM2015 provides fundamental predictions for experiments, assists in strategic detector placement to determine neutrino mass hierarchy, and aids in identifying undeclared nuclear reactors. We use cosmochemically and seismologically informed models of the radiogenic lithosphere/mantle combined with the estimated antineutrino flux, as measured by KamLAND and Borexino, to determine the Earth's total antineutrino luminosity at $3.4^{+2.3}_{-2.2} \times 10^{25} \bar{\nu}_e$. We find a dominant flux of geo-neutrinos, predict sub-equal crust and mantle contributions, with $\sim1\%$ of the total flux from man-made nuclear reactors.