Global Antineutrino Modeling: A Web Application

Antineutrinos stream freely from rapidly decaying fission products within nuclear reactors and from long-lived radioactive isotopes and their daughters within Earth. They carry important information about their shrouded sources and about the fundamental properties of neutrinos themselves. The most energetic of these global antineutrinos produce detectable signatures in large, ultra-clear volumes of scintillating liquid, or water doped with gadolinium, viewed by photomultiplier tubes. Information on sources and neutrino properties traditionally results from measuring the energy spectrum rather than from mapping the directions of the antineutrinos. Isolating the spectrum of a source of interest requires knowledge of the spectra of background sources. We introduce a web application for modeling the rate and energy spectrum of antineutrino interactions from nuclear power reactors as well as from the crust and mantle of Earth. Results are instantly available for any surface location. Users may select the location of their device, choose one of 25 existing or potential subsurface detection sites, designate a given location, or explore by moving the cursor over the global map. There are functions for viewing and downloading the energy spectra of individual sources, calculating the significance of observing the signal from a given source relative to the background from the other sources, and injecting the signal from a hypothetical reactor of specified power and location. We demonstrate the utility of the web application with several examples relevant to remote nuclear monitoring and observational neutrino geosciences.