Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter. A Whitepaper
Creators: name: Baum, Sebastian
name: Stengel, Patrick
name: Abe, Natsue
name: Acevedo, Javier F.
name: Araujo, Gabriela R.
name: Asahara, Yoshihiro
name: Avignone, Frank
name: Balogh, Levente
name: Baudis, Laura
name: Boukhtouchen, Yilda
name: Bramante, Joseph
name: Breur, Pieter Alexander
name: Caccianiga, Lorenzo
name: Capozzi, Francesco
name: Collar, Juan I.
name: Ebadi, Reza
name: Edwards, Thomas
name: Eitel, Klaus
name: Elykov, Alexey
name: Ewing, Rodney C.
name: Freese, Katherine
name: Fung, Audrey
name: Galelli, Claudio
name: Glasmacher, Ulrich A.
name: Gleason, Arianna
name: Hasebe, Noriko
name: Hirose, Shigenobu
name: Horiuchi, Shunsaku
name: Hoshino, Yasushi
name: Huber, Patrick
name: Ido, Yuki
name: Igami, Yohei
name: Ishikawa, Norito
name: Itow, Yoshitaka
name: Kamiyama, Takashi
name: Kato, Takenori
name: Kavanagh, Bradley J.
name: Kawamura, Yoji
name: Kazama, Shingo
name: Kenney, Christopher J.
name: Kilminster, Ben
name: Kouketsu, Yui
name: Kozaka, Yukiko
name: Kurinsky, Noah A.
name: Leybourne, Matthew
name: Lucas, Thalles
name: McDonough, William F.
name: Marshall, Mason C.
name: Mateos, Jose Maria
name: Mathur, Anubhav
name: Michibayashi, Katsuyoshi
name: Mkhonto, Sharlotte
name: Murase, Kohta
name: Naka, Tatsuhiro
name: Oguni, Kenji
name: Rajendran, Surjeet
name: Sakane, Hitoshi
name: Sala, Paola
name: Scholberg, Kate
name: Semenec, Ingrida
name: Shiraishi, Takuya
name: Spitz, Joshua
name: Sun, Kai
name: Suzuki, Katsuhiko
name: Tanin, Erwin H.
name: Vincent, Aaron
name: Vladimirov, Nikita
name: Walsworth, Ronald L.
name: Watanabe, Hiroko
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
subject: Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
subject: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
subject: High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
subject: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Minerals are solid state nuclear track detectors - nuclear recoils in a mineral leave latent damage to the crystal structure. Depending on the mineral and its temperature, the damage features are retained in the material from minutes (in low-melting point materials such as salts at a few hundred degrees C) to timescales much larger than the 4.5 Gyr-age of the Solar System (in refractory materials at room temperature). The damage features from the $O(50)$ MeV fission fragments left by spontaneous fission of $^{238}$U and other heavy unstable isotopes have long been used for fission track dating of geological samples. Laboratory studies have demonstrated the readout of defects caused by nuclear recoils with energies as small as $O(1)$ keV. This whitepaper discusses a wide range of possible applications of minerals as detectors for $E_R \gtrsim O(1)$ keV nuclear recoils: Using natural minerals, one could use the damage features accumulated over $O(10)$ Myr$-O(1)$ Gyr to measure astrophysical neutrino fluxes (from the Sun, supernovae, or cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere) as well as search for Dark Matter. Using signals accumulated over months to few-years timescales in laboratory-manufactured minerals, one could measure reactor neutrinos or use them as Dark Matter detectors, potentially with directional sensitivity. Research groups in Europe, Asia, and America have started developing microscopy techniques to read out the $O(1) - O(100)$ nm damage features in crystals left by $O(0.1) - O(100)$ keV nuclear recoils. We report on the status and plans of these programs. The research program towards the realization of such detectors is highly interdisciplinary, combining geoscience, material science, applied and fundamental physics with techniques from quantum information and Artificial Intelligence.
description: 115 pages, many pictures of tracks. Please see the source file for higher resolution versions of some plots. v2: matches the published version