https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13477-z
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Dark matter scattering off 
He in chiral effective field theory
1
Institute for Theoretical Physics Amsterdam and Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Nikhef, Theory Group, Science Park 105, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3
Institut für Theoretische Physik II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany
4
Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-4) and Center for Advanced Simulation and Analytics (CASA), Forschungszentrum Jülich, 52425, Jülich, Germany
Received:
17
June
2024
Accepted:
9
October
2024
Published online:
2
November
2024
We study dark matter scattering off 
He and other light nuclei using chiral effective field theory. We consider scalar DM interactions and include both one- and two-nucleon scattering processes. The DM interactions and nuclear wave functions are obtained from chiral effective field theory and we work up to fourth order in the chiral expansion for the latter to investigate the chiral convergence. The results for the scattering rates can be used to determine the sensitivity of planned experiments to detect relatively light dark matter particles using He. We find that next-to-leading-order scalar currents are smaller than expected from power counting for scattering off He confirming earlier work. However, the results for two-nucleon corrections exhibit a linear regulator dependence indicating potential problems in the applied power counting. We observe a linear correlation between the, in principle not observable, D-wave probability of various light nuclei and the scalar two-nucleon matrix elements, again pointing towards potentially missing contributions.
© The Author(s) 2024
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