Minerals excavated from the Earth's crust contain gigayear-long astroparticle records, which can be read out using acid etching and microscopy, providing unmatched sensitivity to high mass dark matter. A roughly millimetre size slab of 500 million year old muscovite mica, calibrated and analyzed by Snowden-Ifft et al.~in 1990, revealed no signs of dark matter recoils and placed competitive limits on the nuclear interactions for sub-TeV mass dark matter. A different analysis of larger mica slabs in 1986 by Price and Salamon searched for strongly interacting monopoles. After implementing a detailed treatment of Earth's overburden, we utilize these ancient etched mica data to obtain new bounds on high mass dark matter interactions with nuclei.
@article{arxiv.2105.06473,
title = {Old Rocks, New Limits: Excavated Ancient Mica Searches For Dark Matter},
author = {Javier F. Acevedo and Joseph Bramante and Alan Goodman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.06473},
year = {2023}
}