Characterization of Recoil Tracks in Atmospheric Neutrino Paleo-Detectors

Paleo-detectors offer a unique and passive approach to particle detection by using ancient subterranean minerals to record particle interactions and decay. These minerals have been collecting data for hundreds of millions, even up to a billion years, offering a large potential mass*time exposure with little scanned mass. In addition, the age of these paleo-detectors has great utility, as by examining neutrino interactions in differently aged target minerals, we can estimate cosmic-ray flux to in turn give further insight into Earth's transit through the Milky Way. The extent of this reconstruction is estimated at timescales on the order of hundreds of millions of years. We present initial data retrieval efforts using ion irradiation of Au+ in olivine as a test model for paleo-detector events, employing transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques to visualize the nanometer-scale tracks, and pattern-recognition software to measure track width as a function of target depth.