Ancient crystals could rival next-generation dark matter detectors

Paleo-detectors exploit nuclear recoil damage preserved in ancient minerals over geological timescales, trading live detector mass for billion-year exposure. Adding a count of stable lattice vacancies to the usual track-length measurement creates a per-event proxy for energy-loss rate, which differs between neutron-induced and WIMP-induced recoils because WIMP-nucleus scattering scales as A² while neutron scattering does not. Full-cascade SRIM simulations in olivine show this two-observable approach suppresses the dominant neutron background by more than an order of magnitude, reaching spin-independent cross sections near 10⁻⁴⁸ cm² for WIMPs around tens of GeV. A two-stage microscopy readout — combining light-sheet and scanning electron microscopy — is proposed to make a 100-gram-scale analysis experimentally feasible.