Planetary Tomography: Towards Imaging Earth’s Large-scale Structures By Directional Geoneutrino Detection With Ocean Bottom Detector
Editor’s note: when we start to examine other worlds more closely we are going to need tools that allow us to get the best possible understanding of those worlds’ construction as quickly and efficiently as possible. This concept for studying Earth’s internal structure may well be applicable to studying other worlds. Our home world’s formation and evolution over time is intimately intertwined with the emergence and evolution of life. No doubt other worlds will have similar relationships.
Geoneutrinos, electron antineutrinos produced by radioactive decays of heat-producing elements (HPEs) within the Earth, provide unique insights into Earth’s interior and heat budget since their first detection in 2005 by KamLAND.
Conventional geoneutrino detectors currently provide integrated global information and lack the capability to spatially resolve structures deep within the Earth. Here, we evaluate the ability of angular-sensitive geoneutrino detectors to distinguish between homogeneous and heterogeneous mantle models, focusing on Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs).
Our results show that LLSVPs enriched in Th and U yield a distinct flux of geoneutrinos with distinctive angular patterns. An oceanic site above the Pacific LLSVP is considered a particularly favorable detector location. The Ocean Bottom Detector (OBD) project aims to leverage this spatial resolving advantage by deploying a kiloton-scale liquid scintillator detector directly on the ocean floor, enabling unprecedented sensitivity for mantle geoneutrino detection.
These findings demonstrate the critical role of combining geophysical and geochemical data to guide detector site selection, ultimately improving constraints on Earth’s internal heat and the HPE distribution.
Zhihao Xu, Takumi Araki, Simran Chauhan, Brian C. Crow, Max A. A. Dornfest, Stephen T. Dye, John Graham, Misaki Hosoya, Kunio Inoue, John G. Learned, Viacheslav A. Li, William F. McDonough, Takeru Ohno, Takanobu Ono, Taichi Sakai, Jackson Seligman, Nathan Sibert, David Vartanyan, Hiroko Watanabe, Jeffrey Yepez
Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, presented at the XIX International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2025), 24-30 August 2025, Xichang, China
Subjects: Geophysics (physics.geo-ph); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); High Energy Physics – Experiment (hep-ex); High Energy Physics – Phenomenology (hep-ph)
Report number: LLNL-PROC-2013747
Cite as: arXiv:2606.13273 [physics.geo-ph] (or arXiv:2606.13273v1 [physics.geo-ph] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13273
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Submission history
From: Zhihao Xu
[v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:25:48 UTC (1,571 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13273
Astrobiology,
