Speaker
Description
The majority of the mass content of the universe is composed by dark matter, whose specific nature is not known. Among the best motivated dark matter candidates are WIMPs, which can interact with atomic nuclei. Direct dark matter detection experiments aim to observe the scattering of WIMPs off nuclei.
The interpretation of direct detection experiments naturally depends on nuclear structure input that needs to be calculated from nuclear theory. In addition, nuclear theory can also provide a hierarchy between WIMP-nucleon interactions: first, realizing that only selected nuclear responses receive a coherent enhancement by the contribution from all or several nucleons in the nucleus; second, identifying which interactions are expected to be dominant according to the symmetries of QCD, via the chiral effective field theory (EFT) power counting.
My talk will discuss nuclear structure factors for all nuclear targets used in direct detection experiments. I will consider the WIMP-nucleon interactions expected to dominate spin-independent and spin-dependent WIMP-nucleus scattering up to third order in chiral EFT.