Abstract

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter search was a 250-kg active mass dual-phase time projection chamber that operated by detecting light and ionization signals from particles incident on a xenon target. In December 2015, LUX reported a minimum 90% upper C.L. of 6×10−46 cm2 on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon elastic scattering cross section based on a 1.4×104 kg·day exposure in its first science run. Tension between experiments and the absence of a definitive positive detection suggest it would be prudent to search for WIMPs outside the standard spin-independent/spin-dependent paradigm. Recent theoretical work has identified a complete basis of 14 independent effective field theory (EFT) operators to describe WIMP-nucleon interactions. In addition to spin-independent and spin-dependent nuclear responses, these operators can produce novel responses such as angular-momentum-dependent and spin-orbit couplings. Here we report on a search for all 14 of these EFT couplings with data from LUX’s first science run. Limits are placed on each coupling as a function of WIMP mass.Received 26 March 2020Revised 5 May 2021Accepted 25 May 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.122005© 2021 American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasParticle astrophysicsParticle dark matterTechniquesDark matter detectorsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Highlights

  • The existence of a nonluminous, nonbaryonic matter component to the universe is supported by a wealth of astrophysical data ranging from galactic to cosmological scales [1,2,3,4,5]

  • Where ρ0 is the local density of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) in the galactic halo, mχ and mA are the masses of the WIMP and target nucleus respectively, dσ=dER is the differential WIMP-nucleus interaction cross section with respect to recoil energy, v⃗ is the velocity of the incident WIMP with respect to the target, fðv⃗ Þ describes the WIMP velocity distribution, and vmin is the minimum WIMP velocity needed to create a recoil of energy electronic recoils (ERs)

  • We show the expected nuclear recoil (NR) spectrum from a section of operators and three example WIMP masses in Fig. 2; here we make the standard assumptions that the WIMP velocities follow a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution with characteristic velocity v0 1⁄4 220 km=s and escape velocity vesc 1⁄4 544 km=s

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The existence of a nonluminous, nonbaryonic matter component to the universe is supported by a wealth of astrophysical data ranging from galactic to cosmological scales [1,2,3,4,5]. Traditional WIMP direct-detection phenomenology retains only the WIMP-nucleon SI and SD interaction terms, as these interactions do not depend on the momentum transfer of the interaction and feature a finite cross-section in the limit of zero momentum transfer This limit can be inappropriate for two reasons: (1) the Fermi motion of nucleons inside nuclei renders the static limit inaccurate [17]; (2) for larger energy nuclear recoils, the momentum transferred to the nucleus can be significant. We use the first LUX dataset to constrain the coupling strengths of all terms in a complete basis which spans all possible forms of the WIMP-nucleon interactions [17,19,20,21,22] This is a much richer set of interactions than those included in the standard SI/SD paradigm, in particular yielding a set of entirely new nuclear responses with different strengths in different target nuclei. We constrain the coupling strengths of dark matter to nucleons through each of these operators

AN EFFECTIVE FIELD THEORY FRAMEWORK FOR DIRECT DETECTION
A WIMP-nucleon
THE LUX APPARATUS AND FIRST DARK MATTER SEARCH
LUX LIMITS ON WIMP-NUCLEON EFFECTIVE FIELD THEORY INTERACTIONS
Extending the LUX WIMP search window
WIMP-neutron and WIMP-proton limits
Findings
CONCLUSION
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