Chiral Effective Theory of Dark Matter Direct Detection

TL;DR

This paper develops a chiral effective field theory framework to accurately describe dark matter interactions with nucleons and nuclei at GeV scales, bridging high-energy operators and nuclear responses.

Contribution

It introduces a nonperturbative matching procedure from high-energy dark matter-quark interactions to a chiral effective theory for nuclei, including leading contributions.

Findings

Provides a systematic method for deriving nuclear response functions from fundamental dark matter interactions.

Ensures consistency with chiral power counting for all initial Wilson coefficients.

Facilitates more precise predictions for dark matter direct detection experiments.

Abstract

We present the effective field theory for dark matter interactions with the visible sector that is valid at scales of O(1 GeV). Starting with an effective theory describing the interactions of fermionic and scalar dark matter with quarks, gluons and photons via higher dimension operators that would arise from dimension-five and dimension-six operators above electroweak scale, we perform a nonperturbative matching onto a heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory that describes dark matter interactions with light mesons and nucleons. This is then used to obtain the coefficients of the nuclear response functions using a chiral effective theory description of nuclear forces. Our results consistently keep the leading contributions in chiral counting for each of the initial Wilson coefficients.