2021/07/31 by Sebastian Baum, William DeRocco, Thomas D. P. Edwards +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.IM #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.104.123015
published as Phys. Rev. D 104, 123015 (2021) · 26 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables, code available at https://github.com/sbaum90/paleoSens and https://github.com/sbaum90/paleoSpec. Published version
arxiv created 2021/12/10 · arxiv updated 2021/12/13
Paleo-detectors are a proposed experimental technique to search for dark matter by reading out the damage tracks caused by nuclear recoils in small samples of natural minerals. Unlike a conventional real-time direct detection experiment, paleo-detectors have been accumulating these tracks for up to a billion years. These long integration times offer a unique possibility: by reading out paleo-detectors of different ages, one can explore the time-variation of signals on megayear to gigayear timescales. We investigate two examples of dark matter substructure that could give rise to such time-varying signals. First, a dark disk through which the Earth would pass every ∼45 Myr, and second, a dark matter subhalo that the Earth encountered during the past gigayear. We demonstrate that paleo-detectors are sensitive to these examples under a wide variety of experimental scenarios, even in the presence of substantial background uncertainties. This paper shows that paleo-detectors may hold the key to unraveling our Galactic history.