Elastic and inelastic scattering of neutrinos and weakly interacting massive particles on nuclei

Abstract

The event rates for WIMP-nucleus and neutrino-nucleus scattering processes, expected to be detected in ton-scale rare-event detectors, are investigated. We focus on nuclear isotopes that correspond to the target nuclei of current and future experiments looking for WIMP- and neutrino-nucleus events. The nuclear structure calculations, performed in the context of the deformed shell model, are based on Hartree-Fock intrinsic states with angular momentum projection and band mixing for both the elastic and the inelastic channels. Our predictions in the high-recoil-energy tail show that detectable distortions of the measured/expected signal may be interpreted through the inclusion of the non-negligible incoherent channels