Abstract
We present nuclear structure factors that describe the generalized spin-independent coupling of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) to nuclei. Our results are based on state-of-the-art nuclear structure calculations using the large-scale nuclear shell model. Starting from quark- and gluon-level operators, we consider all possible coherently enhanced couplings of spin-1/2 and spin-0 WIMPs to one and two nucleons up to third order in chiral effective field theory. This includes a comprehensive discussion of the structure factors corresponding to the leading two-nucleon currents covering, for the first time, the contribution of spin-2 operators. We provide results for the most relevant nuclear targets considered in present and planned dark matter direct detection experiments: fluorine, silicon, argon, and germanium, complementing our previous work on xenon. All results are also publicly available in a Python notebook.
Highlights
Astrophysical observations have established that more than three quarters of the matter content of the universe are composed of dark matter
We present nuclear structure factors that describe the generalized spin-independent coupling of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) to nuclei
We have presented a comprehensive analysis of the generalized SI scattering of spin-1=2 and spin-0 WIMPs off atomic nuclei
Summary
Astrophysical observations have established that more than three quarters of the matter content of the universe are composed of dark matter. ChEFT provides a power counting that suggests a hierarchy, guided by QCD, for the expected importance of the different NREFT operators [43] This hierarchy is only tentative, because the couplings describing the interaction of the WIMP to the Standard Model fields are not known. [49] and combine the ChEFT framework with large-scale shell model nuclear many-body calculations to calculate the leading nuclear structure factors that exhibit the coherent contribution of several nucleons in the nucleus. All our results are available in the form of a PYTHON notebook, with a brief User’s guide in Appendix D
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