The Effective Field Theory of Dark Matter Direct Detection

By A. Fitzpatrick, Wick Haxton, Emanuel Katz, Nicholas Lubbers, Yiming Xu. 2012

562 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We extend and explore the general non-relativistic effective theory of dark matter (DM) direct detection. We describe the basic non-relativistic building blocks of operators and discuss their symmetry properties, writing down all Galilean-invariant operators up to quadratic order in momentum transfer arising from exchange of particles of spin 1 or less. Any DM particle theory can be translated into the coefficients of an effective operator and any effective operator can be simply related to most general description of the nuclear response. We find several operators which lead to novel nuclear responses. These responses differ significantly from the standard minimal WIMP cases in their relative coupling strengths to various elements, changing how the results from different experiments should be compared against each other. Response functions are evaluated for common DM targets — F, Na, Ge, I, and Xe — using standard shell model techniques. We point out that each of the nuclear responses is familiar from past studies of semi-leptonic electroweak interactions, and thus potentially testable in weak interaction studies. We provide tables of the full set of required matrix elements at finite momentum transfer for a range of common elements, making a careful and fully model-independent analysis possible. Finally, we discuss embedding non-relativistic effective theory operators into UV models of dark matter.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fd948966905fa835d1371c5fc9228433c4d0bef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Form factors for dark matter capture by the Sun in effective theories (2015, background): “In this section we review the theory of dark matter scattering by nucleons and nuclei [30].”
Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, background): “To do this, we can expand the operators according to the nonrelativistic symmetry of Galilean invariance [146, 147].”
Benchmarks for dark matter searches at the LHC (2014, background): “where the first sum runs over N = {n, p} and the second sum over the 12 most general DM/nucleon non-relativistic operators [9, 31].”
Search for dark matter with a 231-day exposure of liquid argon using DEAP-3600 at SNOLAB (2019, result): “These results are complementary to results reported by liquid xenonbased experiments, allowing for further constraints on the nature of the WIMP-nucleon coupling [50,51].”
Particle physics models for the 17 MeV anomaly in beryllium nuclear decays (2016, unknown): “[43] A.”
Lectures on Dark Matter Physics (2016, background): “2 Differential Scattering Cross Section Now, we turn to deriving the differential scattering cross section for the DM-nucleus interaction, taking an effective operator approach [73, 74].”