Snowmass White Paper: Effective Field Theories for Dark Matter Phenomenology

TL;DR

This white paper reviews how effective field theories serve as a crucial framework for modeling and interpreting dark matter interactions across various experiments and cosmic epochs, aiding in model-independent analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of effective field theory applications in dark matter phenomenology, connecting theoretical models to experimental searches.

Findings

Effective field theories enable model-independent analysis of dark matter interactions.

They help quantify uncertainties and improve detection rate estimates.

The paper highlights diverse applications across cosmic history and energy scales.

Abstract

The quest to discover the nature of dark matter continues to drive many of the experimental and observational frontiers in particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology. While there are no definitive signatures to date, there exists a rich ecosystem of experiments searching for signals for a broad class of dark matter models, at different epochs of cosmic history, and through a variety of processes with different characteristic energy scales. Given the multitude of candidates and search strategies, effective field theory has been an important tool for parametrizing the possible interactions between dark matter and Standard Model probes, for quantifying and improving model-independent uncertainties, and for robust estimation of detection rates in the presence of large perturbative corrections. This white paper summarizes a wide range of effective field theory applications for connecting dark matter theories to experiments.