Conventional dark matter detectors are like a soccer goalkeeper waiting for a powerful shot while the ball barely rolls. The invisible particles filling our galaxy often move too slowly to be noticed by sensitive sensors. But nature builds its own accelerators: when a massive star collapses and explodes as a supernova, it hurls dark matter particles with tremendous force, like splinters from an axe.

Such an accelerated "projectile" slams into atoms in ancient minerals and knocks them out of place, leaving a microscopic trace, like a scratch on glass. In olivine crystals that have lain in Earth's crust for billions of years, these scratches accumulate. Researchers calculated how many traces particles of different masses could leave — from a few MeV to hundreds of MeV (for comparison: the electron mass is about 0.5 MeV). They also accounted for background "noise": neutrinos, neutrons from uranium, and nuclear recoils from thorium.

The analysis showed that paleodetectors can detect dark matter in a parameter region that neither current nor planned experiments can reach. Particularly interesting are supernova explosions in our galaxy: their particle flux over geological timescales leaves a distinct signature in minerals. The accumulated exposure over a billion years provides a sensitivity gain of hundreds to thousands of times compared to laboratory instruments that operate for only a few years.

Thus, an ancient rock becomes a time machine. The very slow, almost elusive dark matter that modern traps cannot see turns out to be locked in the crystal lattice: we just need to read these traces.