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  • Open Access

Calorimetric approach to paleodetection of dark matter

S. C. Hedges and P. Huber*

  • Center for Neutrino Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

  • *Contact author: pahuber@vt.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 063062 – Published 29 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/818g-2t94

Abstract

We present the first paleodetector dark-matter sensitivity analysis based on a calorimetric readout, in which the number of stable lattice vacancies produced by each nuclear recoil is used as a per-event observable complementary to the track length. Using full-cascade srim simulations in olivine, we compute the expected sensitivity for a 100  g·1  Gyr exposure. We find that a vacancy-only readout reaches a sensitivity envelope very similar to that of state-of-the-art track-only analyses. The combination of the two observables provides an event-by-event proxy for |dE/dx| and hence for the recoiling nuclear species. Since the neutron-nucleus cross section is approximately flat in nuclear mass while the dark-matter–nucleus cross section scales as A2, this discrimination suppresses the dominant neutron background by more than an order of magnitude at moderate dark-matter masses. The combined-analysis sensitivity reaches spin-independent dark-matter–nucleon cross sections of order 10−48  cm2 at weakly interacting massive particle masses of a few tens of GeV, comparable to future direct-detection experiments. A two-stage readout combining selective-plane illumination microscopy with scanning electron microscopy is identified as a path to making a 100 g-scale analysis plausible.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 063062– Published 29 September, 2026
  • Received 22 May 2026
  • Accepted 3 September 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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