Chemical and physical Earth models agree little as to the radioactive power of the planet. Each predicts a range of radioactive powers, overlapping slightly with the other at about 24 TW, and ...together spanning 14–46 TW. Approximately 20% of this radioactive power (3–8 TW) escapes to space in the form of geoneutrinos. The remaining 11–38 TW heats the planet with significant geodynamical consequences, appearing as the radiogenic component of the 43–49 TW surface heat flow. The nonradiogenic component of the surface heat flow (5–38 TW) is presumably primordial, a legacy of the formation and early evolution of the planet. A constraining measurement of radiogenic heating provides insights to the thermal history of the Earth and potentially discriminates chemical and physical Earth models. Radiogenic heating in the planet primarily springs from unstable nuclides of uranium, thorium, and potassium. The paths to their stable daughter nuclides include nuclear beta decays, producing geoneutrinos. Large subsurface detectors efficiently record the energy but not the direction of the infrequent interactions of the highest‐energy geoneutrinos, originating only from uranium and thorium. The measured energy spectrum of the interactions estimates the relative amounts of these heat‐producing elements, while the intensity estimates planetary radiogenic power. Recent geoneutrino observations in Japan and Italy find consistent values of radiogenic heating. The combined result mildly excludes the lowest model values of radiogenic heating and, assuming whole mantle convection, identifies primordial heat loss. Future observations have the potential to measure radiogenic heating with better precision, further constraining geological models and the thermal evolution of the Earth. This review presents the science and status of geoneutrino observations and the prospects for measuring the radioactive power of the planet.
Key Points
Radiogenic heating and geoneutrino flux are closely related
Earth models predict measurably distinct radioactive heat and geoneutrino flux
Oceanic geoneutrino measurement allows resolution of Earth radioactive power
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The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) Lawrence, A.; Warren, S. J.; Almaini, O. ...
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
08/2007, Volume:
379, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We describe the goals, design, implementation, and initial progress of the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS), a seven-year sky survey which began in 2005 May. UKIDSS is being carried out using ...the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM), which has the largest étendue of any infrared astronomical instrument to date. It is a portfolio of five survey components covering various combinations of the filter set ZYJHK and H2. The Large Area Survey, the Galactic Clusters Survey, and the Galactic Plane Survey cover approximately 7000 deg2 to a depth of K∼ 18; the Deep Extragalactic Survey covers 35 deg2 to K∼ 21, and the Ultra Deep Survey covers 0.77 deg2 to K∼ 23. Summed together UKIDSS is 12 times larger in effective volume than the 2MASS survey. The prime aim of UKIDSS is to provide a long-term astronomical legacy data base; the design is, however, driven by a series of specific goals – for example, to find the nearest and faintest substellar objects, to discover Population II brown dwarfs, if they exist, to determine the substellar mass function, to break the z= 7 quasar barrier; to determine the epoch of re-ionization, to measure the growth of structure from z= 3 to the present day, to determine the epoch of spheroid formation, and to map the Milky Way through the dust, to several kpc. The survey data are being uniformly processed. Images and catalogues are being made available through a fully queryable user interface – the WFCAM Science Archive (http://surveys.roe.ac.uk/wsa). The data are being released in stages. The data are immediately public to astronomers in all ESO member states, and available to the world after 18 months. Before the formal survey began, UKIRT and the UKIDSS consortia collaborated in obtaining and analysing a series of small science verification (SV) projects to complete the commissioning of the camera. We show some results from these SV projects in order to demonstrate the likely power of the eventual complete survey. Finally, using the data from the First Data Release, we assess how well UKIDSS is meeting its design targets so far.
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ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profile: Filoviridae Kuhn, Jens H; Amarasinghe, Gaya K; Basler, Christopher F ...
Journal of general virology,
06/2019, Volume:
100, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Members of the family Filoviridae produce variously shaped, often filamentous, enveloped virions containing linear non-segmented, negative-sense RNA genomes of 15-19 kb. Several filoviruses (e.g., ...Ebola virus) are pathogenic for humans and are highly virulent. Several filoviruses infect bats (e.g., Marburg virus), whereas the hosts of most other filoviruses are unknown. This is a summary of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) Report on Filoviridae, which is available at www.ictv.global/report/filoviridae.
Increasing the distance from which an antineutrino detector is capable of monitoring the operation of a registered reactor, or discovering a clandestine reactor, strengthens the Non-Proliferation of ...Nuclear Weapons Treaty. This paper presents calculations of reactor antineutrino interactions from quasi-elastic neutrino-proton scattering and elastic neutrino-electron scattering in a water-based detector operated ≳ 10 km from a commercial power reactor. It separately calculates signal from the proximal reactor and background from all other registered reactors. The main results are differential and integral interaction rates from the quasi-elastic and elastic processes. There are two underground facilities capable of hosting a detector (∼ 1 kT H2O) project nearby (L ∼ 20 km) an operating commercial reactor (Pth ∼ 3 GW). These reactor-site combinations, which are under consideration for project WATCHMAN, are Perry-Morton on the southern shore of Lake Erie in the United States and Hartlepool-Boulby on the western shore of the North Sea in England. The signal rate from the proximal reactor is about five times greater at the Morton site than at the Boulby site due to shorter reactor-site separation distance, larger reactor thermal power, and greater neutrino oscillation survival probability. Although the background rate from all other reactors is larger at Morton than at Boulby, it is a smaller fraction of the signal rate from the proximal reactor at Morton than at Boulby. Moreover, the Hartlepool power plant has two cores whereas the Perry plant has a single core. The Boulby site, therefore, offers an opportunity for remotely monitoring the on/off cycle of a reactor core under more stringent conditions than does the Morton site.
The terrestrial distribution of U, Th, and K abundances governs the thermal evolution, traces the differentiation, and reflects the bulk composition of the earth. Comparing the bulk earth composition ...to chondritic meteorites estimates the net amounts of these radiogenic heat-producing elements available for partitioning to the crust, mantle, and core. Core formation enriches the abundances of refractory lithophile elements, including U and Th, in the silicate earth by ∼
1.5. Global removal of volatile elements potentially increases this enrichment to ∼
2.8. The K content of the silicate earth follows from the ratio of K to U. Variable enrichment produces a range of possible heat-producing element abundances in the silicate earth. A model assesses the essentially fixed amounts of U, Th, and K in the approximately closed crust reservoir. Subtracting these sequestered crustal amounts of U, Th, and K from the variable amounts in the silicate earth results in a range of possible mantle allocations, leaving global dynamics and thermal evolution poorly constrained. Terrestrial antineutrinos from β-emitting daughter nuclei in the U and Th decay series traverse the earth with negligible attenuation. The rate at which large subsurface instruments observe these geo-neutrinos depends on the distribution of U and Th relative to the detector. Geo-neutrino observations with sensitivity to U and Th in the mantle are able to estimate silicate earth enrichment, leading to a more complete understanding of the origin, accretion, differentiation, and thermal history of the planet.
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Photodissociation of Cerium Oxide Nanocluster Cations Akin, S. T; Ard, S. G; Dye, B. E ...
The journal of physical chemistry. A, Molecules, spectroscopy, kinetics, environment, & general theory,
04/2016, Volume:
120, Issue:
15
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Cerium oxide cluster cations, Ce x O y +, are produced via laser vaporization in a pulsed nozzle source and detected with time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The mass spectrum displays a strongly ...preferred oxide stoichiometry for each cluster with a specific number of metal atoms x, with x ≤ y. Specifically, the most prominent clusters correspond to the formula CeO(CeO2) n +. The cluster cations are mass selected and photodissociated with a Nd:YAG laser at either 532 or 355 nm. The prominent clusters dissociate to produce smaller species also having a similar CeO(CeO2) n + formula, always with apparent leaving groups of (CeO2). The production of CeO(CeO2) n + from the dissociation of many cluster sizes establishes the relative stability of these clusters. Furthermore, the consistent loss of neutral CeO2 shows that the smallest neutral clusters adopt the same oxidation state (IV) as the most common form of bulk cerium oxide. Clusters with higher oxygen content than the CeO(CeO2) n + masses are present with much lower abundance. These species dissociate by the loss of O2, leaving surviving clusters with the CeO(CeO2) n + formula. Density functional theory calculations on these clusters suggest structures composed of stable CeO(CeO2) n + cores with excess oxygen bound to the surface as a superoxide unit (O2 –).
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7.
AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015 Usman, S M; Jocher, G R; Dye, S T ...
Scientific reports,
2015-Sep-01, 2015-09-01, 20150901, Volume:
5, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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 . We find a dominant flux of geo-neutrinos, predict sub-equal crust and mantle contributions, with ~1% of the total flux from man-made nuclear reactors.
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Theia: an advanced optical neutrino detector Askins, M.; Bagdasarian, Z.; Barros, N. ...
The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields,
05/2020, Volume:
80, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
New developments in liquid scintillators, high-efficiency, fast photon detectors, and chromatic photon sorting have opened up the possibility for building a large-scale detector that can discriminate ...between Cherenkov and scintillation signals. Such a detector could reconstruct particle direction and species using Cherenkov light while also having the excellent energy resolution and low threshold of a scintillator detector. Situated deep underground, and utilizing new techniques in computing and reconstruction, this detector could achieve unprecedented levels of background rejection, enabling a rich physics program spanning topics in nuclear, high-energy, and astrophysics, and across a dynamic range from hundreds of keV to many GeV. The scientific program would include observations of low- and high-energy solar neutrinos, determination of neutrino mass ordering and measurement of the neutrino CP-violating phase
δ
, observations of diffuse supernova neutrinos and neutrinos from a supernova burst, sensitive searches for nucleon decay and, ultimately, a search for neutrinoless double beta decay, with sensitivity reaching the normal ordering regime of neutrino mass phase space. This paper describes
Theia
, a detector design that incorporates these new technologies in a practical and affordable way to accomplish the science goals described above.
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We present estimates of the photometric redshifts, stellar masses and star formation histories of sources in the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) HAlf Degree Extragalactic Survey ...(SHADES). This paper describes the 60 SCUBA sources detected in the Lockman Hole covering an area of ∼320 arcmin2. Using photometry spanning the B band to 8 μm, we find that the average SCUBA source forms a significant fraction of its stars in an early period of star formation and that most of the remainder forms in a shorter more intense burst around the redshift it is observed. This trend does not vary significantly with source redshift. However, the sources show a clear increase in stellar mass with redshift, consistent with downsizing. In terms of spectral energy distribution types, only two out of the 51 sources we have obtained photometric redshifts for are best fitted by a quasar-like spectrum, with approximately 80 per cent of the sources being best fitted with late-type spectra (Sc, Im and starburst). By including photometry at 850 μm, we conclude that the average SCUBA source is forming stars at a rate somewhere between 6 and 30 times the rate implied from the rest-frame optical in a dust obscured burst and that this burst creates 15–65 per cent of the total stellar mass. Using a simplistic calculation, we estimate from the average star formation history that between one in five and one in 15 bright (L*+ 2 < Loptical < L*− 1 mag) galaxies in the field over the interval 0 < z < 3 will at some point in their lifetime experience a similar energetic dusty burst of star formation. Finally, we compute the evolution of the star formation rate density and find it peaks around z∼ 2.
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Botanical, mycological, zoological, and prokaryotic species names follow the Linnaean format, consisting of an italicized Latinized binomen with a capitalized genus name and a lower case species ...epithet (e.g., Homo sapiens). Virus species names, however, do not follow a uniform format, and, even when binomial, are not Linnaean in style. In this thought exercise, we attempted to convert all currently official names of species included in the virus family Arenaviridae and the virus order Mononegavirales to Linnaean binomials, and to identify and address associated challenges and concerns. Surprisingly, this endeavor was not as complicated or time-consuming as even the authors of this article expected when conceiving the experiment.
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