Impact of shell model interactions on nuclear responses to WIMP elastic scattering

Abstract

Background: Nuclear recoil from scattering with weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) is a signature searched for in direct detection of dark matter. The underlying WIMP-nucleon interactions could be spin and/or orbital angular momentum (in)dependent. Evaluation of nuclear recoil rates through these interactions requires accounting for nuclear structure, e.g., through shell model calculations. Purpose: To evaluate nuclear response functions induced by these interactions for ${}^{19}$F, ${}^{23}$Na, ${}^{28,29,30}$Si, ${}^{40}$Ar, ${}^{70,72,73,74,76}$Ge, ${}^{127}$I, and ${}^{128,129,130,131,132,134,136}$Xe nuclei that are relevant to current direct detection experiments, and to estimate their sensitivity to shell model interactions. Methods: Shell model calculations are performed with the NuShellX solver. Nuclear response functions from non-relativistic effective field theory (NREFT) are evaluated and integrated over transferred momentum for quantitative comparisons. Results: Although the standard spin independent response is barely sensitive to the structure of the nuclei, large variations with the shell model interaction are often observed for the other channels. Conclusions: Significant uncertainties may arise from the nuclear components of WIMP-nucleus scattering amplitudes due to nuclear structure theory and modelling. These uncertainties should be accounted for in analyses of direct detection experiments.

19 pages, 20 figures. Contains supplementary material at the end

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• Tensor interaction in coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering
• WIMP Dark Matter within the dark photon portal