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Simulating the shielding needed for a dark matter detector inside of an asteroid
Higginbotham, Ethan
Higginbotham, Ethan
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2025
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Technical report
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A potential way to detect WIMPS, while limiting the amount of neutrino interference, is to build a detector inside of an asteroid. This would, as the orbit of the asteroid is away from the Sun, decrease the neutrino flux proportionally to the inverse square law. One of the questions that needs to be answered for this potential project would be: how much shielding does an asteroid need to provide for the detector to limit another significant source of interference, cosmic rays? To examine this question, a simulation using GEANT-4 of showers of cosmic rays was performed at different asteroid radii and a constant detector size. With the results of this simulation, multiple graphs of the relationship between asteroid shielding and the intensity of cosmic rays were produced to provide insight into the requirements of such a detector setup.