Hunting potassium geoneutrinos with liquid scintillator Cherenkov neutrino detectors

Abstract

The research on geoneutrinos is a new interdisciplinary subject involving particle experiments and geo-science. Potassium-40 (40K) decays contribute roughly to 1/3 of the radiogenic heat of the Earth, which is not yet accounted for by experimental observation. Solar neutrino experiments with liquid scintillators have observed uranium and thorium geoneutrinos and are the most promising experiments with regard to low-background neutrino detection. In this study, we present the new concept of using liquid-scintillator Cherenkov detectors to detect the neutrino-electron elastic scattering process of 40K geoneutrinos. Liquid-scintillator Cherenkov detectors using a slow liquid scintillator achieve this goal with both energy and direction measurements for charged particles. Given the directionality, we can significantly suppress the dominant intrinsic background originating from solar neutrinos in conventional liquid-scintillator detectors. We simulated the solar- and geo-neutrino scatterings in the slow liquid scintillator detector, and implemented energy and directional reconstructions for the recoiling electrons. We found that 40K geoneutrinos can be detected with three-standard-deviation accuracy in a kiloton-scale detector.