Solid-State Nuclear Track Detectors

Guo, S.; Chen, Bao-Liu; Durrani, S.A.

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-384873-4.00004-9

Cited by 26 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 315 publications

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“…Foremost, nuclei with energies of order E R = 0.1 − 100 keV should give rise to damage tracks in the material, and such tracks must persist over sufficiently long time scales. Materials with such properties are commonly referred to as Solid State Track Detectors (SSTDs) [65,[96][97][98].…”

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In general, materials must be insulators (or poor semiconductors) with electrical re-sistivity larger than ∼ 2000 Ω cm to record tracks, see Ref. [98] for a more detailed discussion of track formation criteria. Much of research using SSTDs has employed optical microscopy to read out tracks after chemical etching.…”

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For tracks from lighter nuclei, in particular α-particles ( 4 He 2+ ions), the situation is less clear. Proton ( 1 H + ) tracks have been demonstrated to be etchable only in plastics [98]. However, tracks from α-particles with ∼ 5 MeV energies have been measured in (Al 2 O 3 :C,Mg) crystals without etching using confocal laser scanning and structured illumination microscopy [101,102].…”

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The fading, or annealing, of tracks is thought to be due to the diffusion of atoms from the vicinity of the damaged region into the tracks. The annealing time scale is exponentially suppressed with the temperature T of the material [97,98] t ann ∝ e Eann/kT ,…”

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Paleo-detectors: Searching for dark matter with ancient minerals

et al. 2019

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We explore paleo-detectors as an approach to the direct detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter radically different from conventional detectors. Instead of instrumenting a (large) target mass in a laboratory in order to observe WIMP-induced nuclear recoils in real time, the approach is to examine ancient minerals for traces of WIMP-nucleus interactions recorded over timescales as large as 1 Gyr. Here, we discuss the paleo-detector proposal in detail, including background sources and possible target materials. In order to suppress backgrounds induced by radioactive contaminants such as uranium, we propose to use minerals found in marine evaporites or in ultra-basic rocks. We estimate the sensitivity of paleo-detectors to spin-independent and spin-dependent WIMP-nucleus interactions. The sensitivity to low-mass WIMPs with masses mχ 10 GeV extends to WIMP-nucleon cross sections many orders of magnitude smaller than current upper limits. For heavier WIMPs with masses mχ 30 GeV cross sections a factor of a few to ∼ 100 smaller than current upper limits can be probed by paleo-detectors.

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Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Read-out Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Paleo-detectors: Searching for dark matter with ancient minerals

et al. 2019

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“…In lieu of the multi-ton target masses used in conventional direct detection experiments, paleodetectors take advantage of the fact that DM may have been interacting with the target material for as long as ∼ 1 Gyr. In certain minerals, including those long used as Solid State Track Detectors (SSTDs) [40][41][42][43], DMinduced nuclear recoils would give rise to 1 − 500 nm long damage tracks. In many materials, such damage tracks would be preserved over timescales much longer than 1 Gyr.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digging for dark matter: Spectral analysis and discovery potential of paleo-detectors

et al. 2019

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Paleo-detectors are a recently proposed method for the direct detection of Dark Matter (DM). In such detectors, one would search for the persistent damage features left by DM-nucleus interactions in ancient minerals. Initial sensitivity projections have shown that paleo-detectors could probe much of the remaining Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) parameter space. In this paper, we improve upon the cut-and-count approach previously used to estimate the sensitivity by performing a full spectral analysis of the background-and DM-induced signal spectra. We consider two scenarios for the systematic errors on the background spectra: i) systematic errors on the normalization only, and ii) systematic errors on the shape of the backgrounds. We find that the projected sensitivity is rather robust to imperfect knowledge of the backgrounds. Finally, we study how well the parameters of the true WIMP model could be reconstructed in the hypothetical case of a WIMP discovery.

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