Speaker
Description
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 take the example of the dessication of the Mediterranean Sea in the Messinian period ($\sim$ 6 Myr ago), when lots of evaporites have been formed. These evaporites were exposed to secondary cosmic rays for $\sim$500 kyr and then submerged again. The large number of tracks expected with respect to other paleo-detectors applications potentially enables the measurement of $\sim$1% variation of the cosmic ray flux in the exposure period. We discuss also other possible scenarios where a similar approach can be used.
