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Old Rocks, New Limits: Excavated Ancient Mica Searches For Dark Matter

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arxiv 2105.06473 v2 pith:PFF27AKX submitted 2021-05-13 hep-ph hep-ex

classification hep-phhep-ex
keywords darkmattermicamassancientearthexcavatedhigh
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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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.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter 2025 Proceedings

    physics.ins-det 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    A workshop proceedings presenting 20 status reports on mineral detectors as passive, long-exposure nuclear recoil detectors for dark matter, neutrinos, and cosmic rays.

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