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arXiv · 2604.00808

Potassium-40 geoneutrinos detection and the Earth's large-scale structures imaging by directional geoneutrino detection

Haozhe Sun·Zhe Wang·Shaomin Chen
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Abstract

Geoneutrinos, the electron (anti)neutrinos generated in decays or decay chains of radioactive elements within the Earth, primarily K-40, U-238, and Th-232, serve as a unique probe of the Earth's inner chemical composition. A directional geoneutrino detection method with a Cherenkov liquid scintillator is investigated in this work. Neutrino-electron elastic scattering in the Cherenkov scintillator is employed to detect geoneutrinos. The direction reconstruction resolution for neutrinos is studied. The radioactive and solar neutrino backgrounds are taken into account. The intrinsic neutrino background from the Sun is suppressed with an optimized solar angle cut. The required exposure to reach a 3 sigma sensitivity to discover geoneutrinos in a potassium-dominated energy region is 6.9 kiloton-years. The potential to image Earth's large-scale structures using directional geoneutrino information is also studied. The required exposure to reject a uniform terrestrial angle distribution of geoneutrinos at the 3 sigma level exceeds 27 kiloton-years.

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Haozhe Sun, Zhe Wang, Shaomin Chen. 2026-04-01. Potassium-40 geoneutrinos detection and the Earth's large-scale structures imaging by directional geoneutrino detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00808

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