Antineutrinos don't interact with almost anything. They're just a bunch of wimps. They're harmless. Neat for mapping nuclear reactors tho.
Could these be used to locate nuclear submarines and the like?
No. This is a map of estimated antineutrino rates generated from known data.
Data from a theoretical detector that can calculate where its detected neutrinos came from from could be compared to this to find anomalies, but we're not there yet
Probably not, unless the military is hiding some next level tech.
For example, the current generation of detectors, nearly all of which weigh upwards of a ton, have to be placed within tens of meters of a reactor’s core—inside a facility’s fence.
How is the map data obtained?
Edit: Looked up the article. It seems they took known geological data and calculated the geo-antineutrino flux map based on measurements from detectors in Japan and Italy. Reactor antineutrinos are calculated from the international atomic energy agency data and assumptions on antineutrino rates.
In short, this is just a distance-from-nuclear reactors map
are you saying we're making dark matter here on earth
That's a good question, but no. It was just a bit of word play.
Antineutrinos are not WIMPs. WIMPs are weakly interacting massive particles. Antineutrinos are anything but massive, they're almost massless, so massless that they were, for the longest time, thought to be massless. They can be a product of dark matter, as speculated, but they aren't it tho.
Very cool. I can see my workplace on this map.
