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Dr Alexey Elykov (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)), Patrick Stengel (Jožef Stefan Institute)4/14/26, 9:00 AM
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Belina von Krosigk (Heidelberg University)4/14/26, 9:15 AM
The existence of dark matter is well established through its gravitational effects on astrophysical and cosmological scales, yet its particle nature remains unknown. Among the most compelling candidates are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and other particle-like dark matter scenarios that can be probed through direct detection experiments. In this overview talk, I will provide a...
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Holger Kluck (Marietta Blau Institute for Particle Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences)4/14/26, 10:30 AM
Mineral detectors look for signals of new and interesting physics by studying defects in the crystal lattice of natural minerals caused by recoiling nuclei. As the measurement happens sometimes Gyr after the searched-for interaction, this can be understood as the extreme case of a “long-lived” signal. In contrast, cryogenic calorimeters are used to study the temperature increase caused by the...
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TBD4/14/26, 11:00 AM
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4/14/26, 11:30 AM
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Nikita Vladimirov (Universität Zürich)4/14/26, 1:30 PM
The mesoSPIM is a grass-root initiative of microscopy builders (www.mesospim.org) that started in Laboratory of Neural Circuit Dynamics at the University of Zurich (UZH) in 2015 with the aim of democratizing access to DIY high-performance light-sheet microscopes. It gradually gained recognition among biomedical research labs and light microscopy facilities around the world. Unexpectedly to its...
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Florian Jörg (Universität Zürich), Luisa Hötzsch (Universität Zürich)4/14/26, 2:00 PM
Deep underground laboratories provide the low-background environments essential for rare-event searches. The Bedretto tunnel, situated under the Gotthard massif in Switzerland, offers an exciting opportunity to establish such a facility. Located within two hours of the University of Zürich, the site is conveniently accessible for iterative detector development and commissioning. The tunnel...
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4/14/26, 2:30 PM
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Samuel Hedges (Virginia Tech)4/14/26, 3:00 PM
Nuclear recoils can induce damage in crystal lattices; in certain materials, these defects can capture electrons, turning them optically active (i.e. color centers). At Virginia Tech, we have constructed the mesoSPIM light-sheet fluorescence microscope, which can rapidly image recoil-induced defects in cm3-volumes with micrometer-scale precision. In this talk, I will present commissioning data...
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Patrick Huber (Virginia Tech)4/14/26, 3:30 PM
We will compare calorimetric readout using color center counting with track length based dark matter searches in paleo detectors.
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Daniel Ang (University of Maryland)4/14/26, 4:30 PM
Diamond is uniquely suitable as a model system for mineral-based detection of dark matter (DM) and neutrinos, benefitting from an unmatched suite of quantum defect sensors for imaging damage tracks, the wide availability of high-quality synthetic samples, and decades of systematic gemological study producing vast, well-characterized libraries of natural samples. Insights from diamond therefore...
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Igor Jovanovic4/14/26, 5:00 PM
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4/14/26, 5:30 PM
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Lorenzo Caccianiga (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - Sezione di Milano)4/15/26, 9:00 AM
Cosmic rays are usually treated as a background to be suppressed in dark matter and neutrino physics. However, for mineral paleo-detectors, they serve as the primary signal, encoding high-energy astrophysical history over millions of years. This talk details the interaction of cosmic rays with natural minerals and the methodology used to reconstruct past astrophysical fluxes from latent damage...
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Vincent Breton (CNRS-IN2P3)4/15/26, 9:45 AM
The LMV and the LPCA are two French research laboratories focusing on the study of volcanology, petrology, and geochemistry (LMV) and of particle physics, cosmology and their applications (LPCA). They have been collaborating since many years at the interface between geosciences, nuclear and particle physics on a variety of topics. Two platforms are of particular interest for paleodetector...
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Claudio Galelli (INFN Milano)4/15/26, 10:45 AM
The PRImuS experiment is an experimental effort to validate natural minerals as solid-state detectors for paleo-cosmic ray fluxes. This talk presents recent simulative efforts and the experimental status of the project. I will first highlight the results from our latest published paper, in which we simulate the cosmic-ray-induced track count in olivine xenoliths from the Chaîne des Puys,...
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Jin-Wei Wang (UESTC)4/15/26, 11:15 AM
We present the first dedicated analysis of cosmic-ray boosted dark matter (CRDM) in paleo detectors. Owing to their large kinetic energies, CRDM particles generate nuclear-recoil tracks that extend to substantially larger lengths than those produced by dominant backgrounds from neutrinos and intrinsic radioactivity. Combined with the ultra-large effective geological exposure of 10^5 tyr, paleo...
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4/15/26, 11:45 AM
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Ranny Budnik (Weizmann Institute of Science)4/15/26, 1:45 PM
Color centers in lithium fluoride (LiF) crystals provide a promising approach for detecting sub-GeV dark matter via low-energy excitations. We present new results on the formation of relevant defect centers in LiF, together with advances in their treatment and characterization. We study the response of these centers to different interaction channels, including electronic and nuclear recoils,...
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Samuel Wong (University of Washington)4/15/26, 2:15 PM
We propose a method for detecting an ambient density of heavy, electrically charged particles around the Earth. Such particles would impinge the Earth, lose energy in terrestrial matter, and become trapped. We examine the accumulation of these rare particles in multiple target materials that offer substantial exposure, such as large monitored water/ice volumes, geological rocks, and ancient...
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4/15/26, 2:45 PM
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Ayuki Kamada (University of Warsaw)4/15/26, 3:15 PM
A remarkable aspect of mineral-detector search for dark matter is its long exposure.
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It can overcome so-called flux limit of ordinary dark matter search.
This allows us to probe not only a dominant component of dark matter, but also sub-dominant or even rare objects in the Universe, including topological defects.
In this talk, we examine a possibility of detecting cosmological relic of... -
Anupam Ray (Queen's University & Perimeter Institute)4/15/26, 3:45 PM
The nature of dark matter remains one of the central open questions in physics, with conventional direct-detection experiments losing sensitivity for very heavy candidates due to their extremely low number densities. In this talk, I will present the potential of muscovite mica crystals as paleo-detectors to search for dark matter with masses far above the weak scale, leveraging their...
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Kohta Murase4/15/26, 4:45 PM
Paleodetectors offer a novel approach to dark matter searches by recording damage tracks produced by rare scattering events over geological timescales. In this talk, I discuss the prospects for probing boosted or heavy dark matter with paleodetectors, especially with a focus on the proposed DMica concept.
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4/15/26, 5:15 PM
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Patrick Stengel (Jožef Stefan Institute)4/16/26, 9:00 AM
Mineral detectors are a novel probe of neutrino physics. Low effective nuclear recoil energy detection thresholds allow mineral detectors to potentially measure coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering. Mineral detectors are also envisioned to have exposures comparable to neutrino observatories and, thus, could probe the nuclear recoil signatures of astrophysical neutrino fluxes. While...
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Xiuyuan Zhang (MIT)4/16/26, 9:45 AM
Lambda cold dark matter ($\Lambda$ CDM) is widely considered as the standard model of the Big Bang cosmology that contains a postulated new particle called dark matter (DM), which makes up for 85% of the matter of the universe. However, DM has yet to be detected non gravitationally. One of the major ways of probing it is through direct detection experiments measuring the cross section of dark...
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Dionysios Theodosopoulos (The University of Texas at Austin)4/16/26, 10:45 AM
Within the framework of a non-relativistic effective field theory (NREFT), WIMP–nucleon interactions are described by a complete basis of operators that capture momentum and spin dependencies beyond the standard spin-independent and spin-dependent cases. We present projections of the sensitivity of paleo-detectors to the full set of elastic and inelastic NREFT operators and compare their...
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Pieter Vermeesch (University College London)4/16/26, 11:15 AM
The 2017 discovery of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) confirmed experimentally for the first time the process that gives rise to palaeo-neutrino damage tracks. By increasing the exposure time of neutrino detectors from human to geological timescales, it is possible to shrink their physical size from thousands of tonnes to mere kilograms. Realising palaeo-detection (the...
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Tatsuhiro Naka (Toho University)4/16/26, 11:45 AM
Ultra-heavy exotic particles (UHPs) are motivated by several proposed solutions to outstanding problems in particle physics. In this work, we focus on Q-balls and strange quark matter (SQM), which are well-motivated candidates for new physics and dark matter.
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So far, we have investigated the track formation performance of muscovite mica and olivine, and found that both minerals are promising... -
Hannah Ross (University of Michigan)4/17/26, 9:00 AM
Paleo-detector research at the University of Michigan aims to use ancient minerals as solid-state detectors, preserving evidence of neutrino and dark matter interactions over geologic timescales. Once a mineral sample has been selected as a promising paleo-detector candidate, preparing the sample and determining the proper analysis techniques requires thoughtfulness and care. Track geometry,...
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Emilie LaVoie-Ingram (University of Michigan), Kai Sun4/17/26, 9:20 AM
The use of ancient minerals as paleo-detectors is an emerging experimental technique capable of transforming the fields of neutrino and dark matter detection. Towards developing a successful mineral detector, we can utilize tools like simulation and track measurement algorithms to help understand the complex dynamics of defect formation in a variety of minerals. Progress on the use of these...
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Noriko Hasebe (Kanazawa University)4/17/26, 10:30 AM
This study examines tracks found in natural muscovite using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The muscovite samples were etched in 47% HF at 32 °C for durations ranging from 6 minutes to 2 hours, and naturally occurring ARTs were observed. Sparse but well-defined ART etch pits were present in all samples regardless of etching duration, indicating that ARTs are revealed rapidly. The track...
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Chris Kelso (University of North Florida)4/17/26, 11:00 AM
This talk will present results from several techniques utilized for surface characterization of mineral samples relevant for particle detection as part of the NSF Growing Convergence Research group. Atomic force microscopy was utilized to measure the stiffness and strain of quartz and olivine samples with tracks created by 15 MeV Au$^{5+}$ ions. We utilized non-irradiated reference samples...
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Shigenobu Hirose (JAMSTEC)4/17/26, 11:30 AM
The Python packages
Go to contribution pagepaleoSensandpaleoSpec, developed by Baum et al., are widely used to forecast the sensitivity of paleo-detectors. In the standard framework,paleoSpeccomputes recoil-energy spectra for signal and backgrounds and converts them into track-length histograms, whilepaleoSensderives projected sensitivities from the resulting signal and background histograms through...
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