Etching Plastic Searches for Dark Matter

Abstract

Large panels of etched plastic, situated aboard the Skylab Space Station and inside the Ohya quarry near Tokyo, have been used to set limits on fluxes of cosmogenic particles. These plastic particle track detectors also provide the best sensitivity for some heavy dark matter that interacts strongly with nuclei. We revisit prior dark matter bounds from Skylab, and incorporate geometry-dependent thresholds, a halo velocity distribution, and a complete accounting of observed through-going particle fluxes. These considerations reduce the Skylab bound's mass range by a few orders of magnitude. However, a new analysis of Ohya data covers a portion of the prior Skylab bound, and excludes dark matter masses up to the Planck mass. Prospects for future etched plastic dark matter searches are discussed.

arXiv commentUpdated to published version

References in corpus (44)

• Local Kinematics and the Local Standard of Rest
• The Milky Way's circular velocity curve between 4 and 14 kpc from APOGEE data
• The Circular Velocity Curve of the Milky Way from $5$ to $25$ kpc
• Constraining Dark Matter-Baryon Scattering with Linear Cosmology
• Towards Closing the Window on Strongly Interacting Dark Matter: Far-Reaching Constraints from Earth's Heat Flow
• Quirky Composite Dark Matter
• Constraints on scattering of keV--TeV dark matter with protons in the early Universe
• Dark Nuclei I: Cosmology and Indirect Detection
• Dark Quark Nuggets
• Macro Dark Matter
• Detecting Technibaryon Dark Matter
• Stable Bound States of Asymmetric Dark Matter
• Composite Inelastic Dark Matter
• The local high velocity tail and the Galactic escape speed
• Big Bang Darkleosynthesis
• Big Bang Synthesis of Nuclear Dark Matter
• The Gravitational Force Field of the Galaxy Measured From the Kinematics of RR Lyrae in Gaia
• Gravity-mediated (or Composite) Dark Matter
• Making Asymmetric Dark Matter Gold: Early Universe Synthesis of Nuggets
• Earth-Scattering of super-heavy Dark Matter: updated constraints from detectors old and new
• Nuclear Structure of Bound States of Asymmetric Dark Matter
• (Not as) Big as a Barn: Upper Bounds on Dark Matter-Nucleus Cross Sections
• Detecting Dark Blobs
• Saturated Overburden Scattering and the Multiscatter Frontier: Discovering Dark Matter at the Planck Mass and Beyond
• Galactic Center Gas Clouds and Novel Bounds on Ultra-Light Dark Photon, Vector Portal, Strongly Interacting, Composite, and Super-Heavy Dark Matter
• Signatures of Large Composite Dark Matter States
• Yukawa Bound States of a Large Number of Fermions
• Astrophysical Signatures of Asymmetric Dark Matter Bound States
• Dark Matter, Destroyer of Worlds: Neutrino, Thermal, and Existential Signatures from Black Holes in the Sun and Earth
• Direct Detection of Bound States of Asymmetric Dark Matter
• A measurement of the Galactic plane mass density from binary pulsar accelerations
• Foraging for dark matter in large volume liquid scintillator neutrino detectors with multiscatter events
• Terrestrial and Martian Heat Flow Limits on Dark Matter
• Direct Detection Limits on Heavy Dark Matter
• Composite Asymmetric Dark Matter with a Dark Photon Portal
• Detecting Composite Dark Matter with Long Range and Contact Interactions in Gas Clouds
• New Experimental Constraints in a New Landscape for Composite Dark Matter
• Nuclear Fusion Inside Dark Matter
• Dark matter astrometry at underground detectors with multiscatter events
• Nucleus Capture by Macroscopic Dark Matter
• Constraints on Dark Matter from the Moon
• Self-Interacting Dark Matter
• Electroweak-Symmetric Dark Monopoles from Preheating
• A purely acceleration-based measurement of the fundamental Galactic parameters

Cited by in corpus (17)

• First direct detection constraints on Planck-scale mass dark matter with multiple-scatter signatures using the DEAP-3600 detector
• Accelerating Composite Dark Matter Discovery with Nuclear Recoils and the Migdal Effect
• Snowmass2021 Cosmic Frontier White Paper: Ultraheavy particle dark matter
• Detecting Composite Dark Matter with Long Range and Contact Interactions in Gas Clouds
• Celestial Objects as Strongly-Interacting Non-Annihilating Dark Matter Detectors
• New constraints on ultraheavy dark matter from the LZ experiment
• Pushing the frontier of WIMPy inelastic dark matter: journey to the end of the periodic table
• Searching for Heavy Dark Matter near the Planck Mass with XENON1T
• An Analytic Approach to Light Dark Matter Propagation
• Continuous Gravitational Waves: A New Window to Look for Heavy Non-annihilating Dark Matter
• Gauged Q-ball dark matter through a cosmological first-order phase transition
• New Constraints on Macroscopic Dark Matter Using Radar Meteor Detectors
• Galactic Geology: Probing Time-Varying Dark Matter Signals with Paleo-Detectors
• Diffuse X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Limits on Boson Stars that Interact with Nuclei
• Probing Superheavy Dark Matter with Exoplanets
• Listening for ultra-heavy dark matter with underwater acoustic detectors
• Radiation Exposure from the Dark