English

Geoneutrinos and reactor antineutrinos at SNO+

Geophysics 2016-07-21 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

In the heart of the Creighton Mine near Sudbury (Canada), the SNO+ detector is foreseen to observe almost in equal proportion electron antineutrinos produced by U and Th in the Earth and by nuclear reactors. SNO+ will be the first long baseline experiment to measure a reactor signal dominated by CANDU cores (\sim55\% of the total reactor signal), which generally burn natural uranium. Approximately 18\% of the total geoneutrino signal is generated by the U and Th present in the rocks of the Huronian Supergroup-Sudbury Basin: the 60\% uncertainty on the signal produced by this lithologic unit plays a crucial role on the discrimination power on the mantle signal as well as on the geoneutrino spectral shape reconstruction, which can in principle provide a direct measurement of the Th/U ratio in the Earth.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.05959,
  title  = {Geoneutrinos and reactor antineutrinos at SNO+},
  author = {M Baldoncini and V Strati and S A Wipperfurth and G Fiorentini and F Mantovani and W F McDonough and B Ricci},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05959},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

7 pages including 2 figures and 1 table, in XIV International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2015) IOP Publishing , published on Journal of Physics: Conference Series 718 (2016) 062003