Measuring Changes in the Atmospheric Neutrino Rate Over Gigayear Timescales

Abstract

Measuring the cosmic ray flux over timescales comparable to the age of the solar system, $\sim 4.5$Gyr, could provide a new window on the history of the Earth, the solar system, and even our galaxy. We present a technique to indirectly measure the rate of cosmic rays as a function of time using the imprints of atmospheric neutrinos in paleo-detectors, natural minerals which record damage tracks from nuclear recoils. Minerals commonly found on Earth are $\lesssim 1$Gyr old, providing the ability to look back across cosmic ray history on timescales of the same order as the age of the solar system. Given a collection of differently aged samples dated with reasonable accuracy, this technique is particularly well-suited to measuring historical changes in the cosmic ray flux at Earth and is broadly applicable in astrophysics and geophysics.

arXiv commentUpdated to match PRL version; 6 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Ultra-Heavy Dark Matter Search with Electron Microscopy of Geological Quartz
• Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter. A Whitepaper
• Directional Detection of Dark Matter Using Solid-State Quantum Sensing
• New Projections for Dark Matter Searches with Paleo-Detectors
• Measuring solar neutrinos over Gigayear timescales with Paleo Detectors
• Rocks, Water and Noble Liquids: Unfolding the Flavor Contents of Supernova Neutrinos
• Galactic Geology: Probing Time-Varying Dark Matter Signals with Paleo-Detectors
• Sedimentary rocks from Mediterranean drought in the Messinian age as a probe of the past cosmic ray flux
• Projected Sensitivity of Paleo-Detectors to Dark Matter Effective Interactions with Nuclei