Techknowledgey 2005

摘要

In the past, if you were inclined to wonder about the internal workings of the Earth, seismology (the analysis of vibrations produced by earthquakes and sensed by thousands of instrument stations worldwide) was pretty much the only analysis tool available to you. But a new approach has been developed by physicists who study neutrinos and their antiparticles, called "antineutrinos," which emanate from nuclear reactors. As it turns out, antineutrinos also flow from the Earth's interior when uranium and thorium isotopes undergo a cascade of heat-generating radioactive decay processes. A detector in Japan, called KamLAND (for Kamioka liquid scintillator antineutrino detector) has sensed the geologically produced antineutrinos, known as "geoneutrinos."