Renormalization Group Effects in Dark Matter Interactions

TL;DR

This paper performs a detailed renormalization-group analysis of dark matter interactions with the standard model, revealing significant effects on scattering rates due to electroweak running.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive RG evolution of dark matter effective operators from high to low scales, including matching and nuclear interactions.

Findings

Dark matter-nucleus scattering rates can vary by orders of magnitude due to electroweak RG effects.

Complete set of dimension-six operators analyzed for the first time in this context.

Numerical examples demonstrate the importance of RG effects in dark matter detection predictions.

Abstract

We present a renormalization-group (RG) analysis of dark matter interactions with the standard model, where dark matter is allowed to be a component of an electroweak multiplet, and has a mass at or below the electroweak scale. We consider, in addition to the gauge interactions, the complete set of effective operators for dark matter interactions with the standard model above the weak scale, up to and including mass dimension six. We calculate the RG evolution of these operators from the high scale Lambda down to the weak scale, and perform the matching to the tower of effective theories below the weak scale. We also summarize the RG evolution below the weak scale and the matching to the nonrelativistic nuclear interactions. We present several numerical examples and show that in certain cases the dark matter - nucleus scattering rate can change by orders of magnitude when the electroweak running is included.