Large-scale nuclear structure calculations for spin-dependent WIMP scattering with chiral effective field theory currents

TL;DR

This paper presents advanced shell-model calculations of structure factors for elastic spin-dependent WIMP scattering on various nuclei, incorporating chiral EFT currents and providing comprehensive results with uncertainty estimates.

Contribution

It introduces state-of-the-art large-scale shell-model calculations including chiral EFT currents for multiple nuclei relevant to dark matter detection, with detailed uncertainty analysis.

Findings

Structure factors for multiple nuclei are computed with theoretical error bands.

Inclusion of two-body currents from chiral EFT impacts the scattering predictions.

Results enhance the accuracy of dark matter direct detection models.

Abstract

We perform state-of-the-art large-scale shell-model calculations of the structure factors for elastic spin-dependent WIMP scattering off 129,131Xe, 127I, 73Ge, 19F, 23Na, 27Al, and 29Si. This comprehensive survey covers the non-zero-spin nuclei relevant to direct dark matter detection. We include a pedagogical presentation of the formalism necessary to describe elastic and inelastic WIMP-nucleus scattering. The valence spaces and nuclear interactions employed have been previously used in nuclear structure calculations for these mass regions and yield a good spectroscopic description of these isotopes. We use spin-dependent WIMP-nucleus currents based on chiral effective field theory (EFT) at the one-body level and including the leading long-range two-body currents due to pion exchange, which are predicted in chiral EFT. Results for all structure factors are provided with theoretical error bands due to the nuclear uncertainties of WIMP currents in nuclei.