Ab initio nuclear response functions for dark matter searches [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09165


We study the process of dark matter particles scattering off $^{3,4}$He with nuclear wave functions computed using an ab initio many-body framework. We employ realistic nuclear interactions from chiral effective field theory at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) and develop an ab initio scheme to compute a general set of different nuclear response functions. In particular, we then perform an accompanying uncertainty quantification on these quantities and study error propagation to physical observables. We find a rich structure of allowed nuclear responses with significant uncertainties for certain spin-dependent interactions. The approach and results that are presented in this Paper establish a new framework for nuclear structure calculations and uncertainty quantification in the context of direct and (certain) indirect searches for dark matter.

Read this paper on arXiv…

D. Gazda, R. Catena and C. Forssen
Fri, 30 Dec 16
22/64

Comments: 13 pages, 8 figures