What if a mineral could reveal what it’s seen over the millions—or billions—of years it’s been sitting deep within Earth? An interdisciplinary global network of scientists is reviving efforts to unlock the secrets that minerals hold. The top goals are to identify dark matter, learn more about neutrinos, and use both as cosmological probes.
Over epochs, even a tiny grain of sand would be exposed to an enormous flux of neutrinos and dark matter. Using such samples trades mass for time: A 1 g, billion-year-old mineral offers the same total exposure as a 1000-metric-ton target mass over one year; for the same exposure, the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, with its 5.5 metric tons of liquid xenon, would have to hunt for dark matter particles for 182 years. And whereas giant conventional detectors provide a snapshot from the period of observation, minerals harbor data...
