Informal seminar: Fady Bishara

Speaker: Fady Bishara

Title: Chiral Effective Theory of Dark Matter Direct Detection

Abstract:
The existence of Dark Matter (DM) is observationally well established due to its gravitational interactions. If in addition DM is a particle, complementarity (i.e. direct, indirect, and collider searches together) will play a crucial role in identifying its putative particle nature and perhaps in unravelling the underlying model. However, complementarity between different search strategies also entails the comparison of experimental results obtained at different energy scales. Further, in direct detection, which is the topic of this talk, the scale of interaction between the DM and atomic nuclei is widely separated from the scale of the DM itself in a large class of DM models.
I will describe our work to write down a consistent tower of effective field theories (EFTs) to connect all relevant intervening energy scales down to the nuclear scale. In particular, I will discuss the role of meson exchanges and will show a few examples to illustrate their effect on the direct detection scattering rates which can be sizeable. Finally, I will present a Mathematica package 'DirectDM' which performs all the required matching and running automatically.