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Galactic geology: Probing time-varying dark matter signals with paleodetectors
- Source :
- Physical Review D. 104
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- American Physical Society (APS), 2021.
-
Abstract
- 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 $\sim$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.<br />26 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables, code available at https://github.com/sbaum90/paleoSens and https://github.com/sbaum90/paleoSpec. Published version
- Subjects :
- Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
010308 nuclear & particles physics
FOS: Physical sciences
Astrophysics::Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
01 natural sciences
High Energy Physics - Experiment
High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
13. Climate action
Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
0103 physical sciences
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
010306 general physics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 24700029 and 24700010
- Volume :
- 104
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Physical Review D
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....c5f94b84bd943438cae884088edea7dc