2021/05/13 by Javier F. Acevedo, Acevedo, Javier F., Joseph Bramante +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Particle Detector Development and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2105.06473
Minerals excavated from the Earth's crust contain gigayear-long astroparticle records, which can be read out using acid etching and microscopy, providing unmatched sensitivity to high mass dark matter. A roughly millimetre size slab of 500 million year old muscovite mica, calibrated and analyzed by Snowden-Ifft et al.~in 1990, revealed no signs of dark matter recoils and placed competitive limits on the nuclear interactions for sub-TeV mass dark matter. A different analysis of larger mica slabs in 1986 by Price and Salamon searched for strongly interacting monopoles. After implementing a detailed treatment of Earth's overburden, we utilize these ancient etched mica data to obtain new bounds on high mass dark matter interactions with nuclei.