Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter. A Whitepaper

Understand

Minerals are solid state nuclear track detectors - nuclear recoils in a mineral leave latent damage to the crystal structure.

• Depending on the mineral and its temperature, the damage features are retained in the material from minutes (in low-melting point materials such as salts at a few hundred degrees C) to timescales much larger than the 4.5 Gyr-age of the Solar System (in refractory materials at room temperature).
• The damage features from the $O(50)$ MeV fission fragments left by spontaneous fission of $^{238}$U and other heavy unstable isotopes have long been used for fission track dating of geological samples.
• Laboratory studies have demonstrated the readout of defects caused by nuclear recoils with energies as small as $O(1)$ keV.