Scientists want to hunt for dark matter by looking for tiny footprints it might have left in ancient rocks billions of years ago.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.13629
The Takeaway
Instead of building massive, expensive underground tanks of liquid, this method uses the Earth itself as a giant detector. By scanning ancient rocks for tiny damage paths left by passing dark matter particles over geological timescales, we could effectively look back through deep time to see if dark matter was more common in the past.
From the abstract
Paleo-detectors are a proposed experimental technique for direct detection (DD) of dark matter (DM) via the read-out of DM-induced nuclear recoil tracks in natural minerals. The large detector mass required for the sensitivity of conventional DD experiments to rare events is replaced by the exposure of paleo-detectors to DM-induced nuclear recoils over geological timescales. In this paper, we extend previous theoretical predictions for canonical spin-independent coherent and spin-dependent scatt