Speaker
Description
Paleo-detectors provide a novel experimental technique to search for dark matter (DM), with experimental efforts now funded by the NSF in the US as well as the Moore Foundation. In lieu of the conventional approach of operating a tonne-scale real-time detector to search for DM-induced nuclear recoils, paleo-detectors take advantage of small samples of naturally occurring rocks on Earth that have been deep underground (≳5 km), accumulating nuclear damage tracks from recoiling nuclei for O(1) Gyr. Modern microscopy techniques promise the capability to read out nuclear damage tracks with nanometer resolution in macroscopic samples. Thanks to their O(1) Gyr integration times, paleo-detectors could constitute nuclear recoil detectors with keV recoil energy thresholds and 100 kilotonne-yr exposures. This combination would allow paleo-detectors to probe DM-nucleon cross sections orders of magnitude below existing upper limits from conventional direct detection experiments.
| Main Contribution topic | Direct detection |
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