Participants of the international experiment Borexino carried out in March 2010 at the underground laboratory of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics of Italy (INFN) located in the Gran Sasso mountains in the Central Apennines, registered geoneutrinos—particles coming out of the magma surrounding the Earth core. Specialists observed a stable antineutrino signal with an energy spectrum equal to the expected spectrum resulting from the beta-composition of radioactive elements of uranium-238 and thorium-232 chains. Thus, for the first time they proved a radiogenic contribution of neutrino to the heat produced in the interiors of the Earth. An article dedicated to this experiment has been published in the Europhysics Letters (EPL) magazine.
Researchers of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research Yuri Gornushkin and Oleg Smirnov who participated in the experiment told about their results in the weekly newspaper Dubna: Science, Cooperation, Progress. Note: the experiment has been carried out in cooperation with research associates of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Russian Scientific Center "Kurchatov Institute", Research Center for Nuclear Physics named after D. Skobeltsyn under Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moscow), and RAS St. Petersburg Institute for Nuclear Physics named after B. Konstantinov. As for foreign partners, Universities of Milan, Genoa, Perugia (Italy), Munich Technical University, Max Planck Institute (Germany), Laboratory of Astroparticles and Cosmology of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (France), Jagellonian University (Krakow, Poland), Princeton University and Virginia Polytechnic University (USA) took also part in the experiment.
Neutrinos are stable neutral particles weakly interacting with the substance. The Sun and cosmic rays are considered "typical" sources of neutrinos. But physicists assume that: electronic antineutrinos can also occur in the interiors of the Earth as a result o ...
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