Speaker
Description
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, to find the signal left by the astroparticles, one should precisely know the exposure time and the age of the minerals. We could remove the time dependencies taking two minerals generated in the same geological event and finding the ratio between the tracks found in the two minerals. As a case of study, we consider two zircons, generated in the same volcanic eruption (of $\mathcal{O}$(kyr) ago), but with different Uranium and Thorium contents: since Uranium and Thorium have different decay times and different cross sections of induced fission per muon stopped, we could verify the presence of tracks left by cosmic rays using standard track detection techniques.
