Investigating past high-energy fluxes with paleo-detectors

Paleo-detectors provide a unique avenue to reconstruct the multi-million-year history of cosmic-ray (CR) flux, preserving signatures of transient high-energy events such as nearby supernovae. This technique aims to use natural minerals as particle detectors, looking at the persistent damage tracks created by CR-induced nuclear recoils, accumulated over the minerals' geological lifespan, offering a geological archive of past particle fluxes. Building on our study of Messinian Salinity Crisis evaporites, which demonstrated that minerals with specific geological histories may enable the detection of primary CR flux variations, we have now expanded to diverse terrestrial records. This contribution presents our recent publication proposing olivine xenoliths from Auvergne, France, where eruption chronosequences could allow for the differentiation of CR flux scenarios over the last 50 kyr. This phenomenological work is supported by the INFN-funded PRImuS experiment, which aims to prove the efficacy of high-throughput optical microscopy and plasma etching to analyze these mineral targets. By validating theoretical track-length spectra and refining the estimates of experimental effects, PRImuS's goal is to establish paleo-detectors as a powerful tool for very-long-range time-domain astrophysics.