Paleo-detectors: Searching for Dark Matter with Ancient Minerals

Understand

We explore paleo-detectors as an approach to the direct detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter radically different from conventional detectors.

• Instead of instrumenting a (large) target mass in a laboratory in order to observe WIMP-induced nuclear recoils in real time, the approach is to examine ancient minerals for traces of WIMP-nucleus interactions recorded over timescales as large as 1 Gyr.
• Here, we discuss the paleo-detector proposal in detail, including background sources and possible target materials.
• In order to suppress backgrounds induced by radioactive contaminants such as uranium, we propose to use minerals found in marine evaporites or in ultra-basic rocks.