I will start with a tale of early paleodetector events, squarely at the boundary of the humorous and the tragic, responsible for setting this field back a good three decades. The speaker will then display a semblance of penitence by discussing fullerenes as geochemical detectors for highly-ionizing exotica, and presenting a primo spot to attempt the hardest trick in this carnival.
We will briefly summarize the materials that have been considered for detection of dark matters/neutrinos in the literature. Then we will focus on mineral detectors especially on olivine. Our recent studies on natural olivine will be presented.
Searching for dark matter typically requires a large amount of material to capture extremely rare interactions. However, natural mineral crystals like mica have been around for geological time scales, offering plenty of exposure even in small samples. These crystals can hold onto nuclear recoil tracks—evidence of dark matter interactions—for periods longer than the Earth's age. When etched,...
Using ancient minerals as paleo-detectors is a proposed experimental technique expected to transform supernova neutrino and dark matter detection. In this technique, minerals are processed and closely analyzed for nanometer scale damage track remnants from nuclear recoils caused by supernova neutrinos and possibly dark matter. These damage tracks present the opportunity to directly detect and...
Nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond have been identified as a promising future platform for directional detection of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter. WIMP particle induces nuclear recoil in the diamond, resulting in a direction-dependent sub-micron damage track. This damage track induces crystal stress variations which shift the energy levels of NV centers, enabling...
Despite the recent advances in physics, Dark Matter (DM) still eludes detection by modern large-scale experiments and puzzles the minds of physicists. Paleo-detectors represent a drastically different approach to DM detection, which necessitates the use of microscopy and computational techniques to read out and analyze nm-sized damage features produced by interactions of DM particles and...
The use of ancient minerals for the detection of dark matter requires a systematic understanding of the full pipeline from energy deposition, to track creation, to readout, and a detailed theoretical mapping at each step, verified by experiment. I will provide a brief overview of some of the activities at Queen’s University that aim to fill in some missing elements in this pipeline. This...
Paleo detectors have been proposed to search for new physics by counting nuclear recoil tracks in minerals deep underground. These tracks have a very low signal-to-background ratio, it is therefore particularly important to accurately model the expected signals. In the literature, an one-to-one relationship between recoil energy and track length was assumed. However, using the simulation...
Neutrinos offer unique probes of astrophysical systems, yet their detections are challenging due to neutrinos' weak interactions. Natural mineral detectors---paleo detectors---can record the history of neutrino fluxes and offer an unparalleled view into astrophysical phenomena. In this talk, I will focus on motivations and sensitivities for supernova neutrinos and solar neutrinos.
Measuring the solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales could provide a new window to inform the solar standard model as well as studies of the Earth’s long-term climate. We demonstrate the feasibility of measuring the time evolution of the B8 solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales using paleo detectors. We explore suitable minerals and identify track lengths of 15–30 nm to be a...
I will discuss some thoughts about supernova neutrino burst detection with mineral detectors.
I will present the status and plans of the University of Michigan effort to image atmospheric neutrinos in Olivine.
Minerals provide unique sensitivity for discovering composite dark matter and other cosmogenic particles, as large amounts of energy are deposited into minerals -- resulting in characteristic damage (e.g., localized amorphization, phase change, grain morphology modification). Large cross-section tracks in minerals from possible dark matter and neutrinos can have widths ranging from nanometers...
The paleo detector is new approach for rare event search in astroparticle physics such as dark matter. The mica is good candidate for the paleo detector because of its cleavage, transparency and relatively low threshold of track formation to the energy deposition due to particles.
In this study, we are focusing on the Q-ball. The Q-ball is non-topological soliton in the early universe, and...
Nuclear recoil events resulting in color centers can be caused by neutron scattering, coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS) or dark matter scattering opens the door to the creation of durable, mineral-based, solid-state detection modalities. In this talk, we present measurements of Radiation-Induced Luminosity (RIL) in CaF 2 crystals. We report on the change in RIL as a function...
Paleo-detectors have so far been considered to detect weakly interacting particles, and the possible cosmic-ray background is ignored supposing to use samples collected from large depths in the Earth's crust. We reverse here this approach by proposing Paleo-detectors to measure cosmic ray fluxes in the past. We use the fact that cosmic rays can be shielded to have specific exposure windows. We...
One of the main challenges in the paleo-detectors technique consists of the identification of the tracks generated by the recoiling particles. However, tracks left by heavy fission fragments are routinely seen in the dating of minerals (obsidians, apatites, zircons ...). Apart from spontaneous fissions, the heavy nuclei ($^{238}$U, $^{232}$Th) can complete fissions induced by muons. However,...
