Refining the sensitivity of new physics searches with ancient minerals

Paleodetection has been proposed as a competitive method for detecting dark matter and other new physics interactions, complementing conventional direct-detection experiments. In this work, we utilize simulations to improve the modeling of track-length distributions. Our findings suggest that previous studies have overestimated the number of tracks caused by weakly interacting particles, and that the lowest observable dark matter mass should be higher than previously predicted. These differences are mainly attributed to the fact that (a) the recoil energy–track-length relation is not one to one, (b) at low recoil energies, a substantial fraction of recoils do not yield any tracks, and (c) at high energies, electronic stopping becomes dominant, resulting in a track-length barrier at <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mo>∼</a:mo><a:mn>200</a:mn><a:mtext> </a:mtext><a:mtext> </a:mtext><a:mi>nm</a:mi></a:math>. In addition to WIMPs, we also modeled tracks from generalized coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (<c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mrow><c:mi>CE</c:mi><c:mi>ν</c:mi><c:mi>NS</c:mi></c:mrow></c:math>) via new light mediators and estimated the projected sensitivity for these interactions.