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Weakly interacting massive particle-nucleus elastic scattering response

Nikhil Anand, A. Liam Fitzpatrick, and W. C. Haxton
Phys. Rev. C 89, 065501 – Published 25 June 2014
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Abstract

Background: A model-independent formulation of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP)-nucleon scattering was recently developed in Galilean-invariant effective field theory.

Purpose: Here we complete the embedding of this effective interaction in the nucleus, constructing the most general elastic nuclear cross section as a factorized product of WIMP and nuclear response functions. This form explicitly defines what can and cannot be learned about the low-energy constants of the effective theory—and consequently about candidate ultraviolet theories of dark matter—from elastic scattering experiments.

Results: We identify those interactions that cannot be reliably treated in a spin-independent/spin-dependent (SI/SD) formulation: For derivative- or velocity-dependent couplings, the SI/SD formulation generally mischaracterizes the relevant nuclear operator and its multipolarity (e.g., scalar or vector) and greatly underestimates experimental sensitivities. This can lead to apparent conflicts between experiments when, in fact, none may exist. The new nuclear responses appearing in the factorized cross section are related to familiar electroweak nuclear operators such as angular momentum l(i) and the spin-orbit coupling σ(i)·l(i).

Conclusions: To unambiguously interpret experiments and to extract all of the available information on the particle physics of dark matter, experimentalists will need to (1) do a sufficient number of experiments with nuclear targets having the requisite sensitivities to the various operators and (2) analyze the results in a formalism that does not arbitrarily limit the candidate operators. In an appendix we describe a code that is available to help interested readers implement such an analysis.

  • Received 20 September 2013
  • Revised 7 January 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.89.065501

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Nikhil Anand1, A. Liam Fitzpatrick2, and W. C. Haxton1,3

  • 1Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 2Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
  • 3Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

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Issue

Vol. 89, Iss. 6 — June 2014

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