Digging for dark matter: Spectral analysis and discovery potential of paleo-detectors

Paleo-detectors are a recently proposed method for the direct detection of dark matter (DM). In such detectors, one would search for the persistent damage features left by DM–nucleus interactions in ancient minerals. Initial sensitivity projections have shown that paleo-detectors could probe much of the remaining weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) parameter space. In this paper, we improve upon the cut-and-count approach previously used to estimate the sensitivity by performing a full spectral analysis of the background- and DM-induced signal spectra. We consider two scenarios for the systematic errors on the background spectra: (i) systematic errors on the normalization only, and (ii) systematic errors on the shape of the backgrounds. We find that the projected sensitivity is rather robust to imperfect knowledge of the backgrounds. Finally, we study how well the parameters of the true WIMP model could be reconstructed in the hypothetical case of a WIMP discovery.