Ab Initio Structure Factors for Spin-Dependent Dark Matter Direct Detection

First Dark Matter Search Results from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment

“…The LZ experiment has achieved the highest sensitivity to spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering for masses greater than 9 GeV/c 2 due to the successful operation of an integrated detector system containing the largest dual-phase xenon TPC to date. LZ is continuing operations at SURF and will undertake further detector and analysis optimization to search for a broad range of rareevent physics searches, including WIMPs, neutrinoless double-beta decay, solar neutrinos, and solar axions [78][79][80] dependent WIMP-proton interaction arises from mixing between proton and neutron spin states in isotopes with an unpaired neutron, albeit with increased uncertainty on the predicted signal rate [84][85][86][87][88]. Signal models are constructed using the nuclear structure factors with uncertainties from Ref.…”

Opportunities for Fundamental Physics Research with Radioactive Molecules

“…With both IMSRG variants, particular care must be taken with effective operators, e.g., the Schiff operator. But, like coupled cluster theory, the IMSRG has already been applied to neutrinoless double-beta decay (Yao et al, 2020;Belley et al, 2021) as well as spin-dependent dark matter scattering (Hu et al, 2022) up to the region of interest for many parity-violation experiments, where similar issues had to be addressed. Preliminary benchmark calculations of EDMs are indeed ongoing for light nuclei.…”

A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics

“…For example, contributions in which the WIMP couples to a virtual pion exchanged between the nucleons inside the nucleus (section II E 3) appear at subleading order in the chiral expansion. Such meson-exchange currents (or twobody currents) provide subleading contributions to generalized spin-independent and spin-dependent scattering and have been studied in a number of papers [153,155,184,[187][188][189][190][191][192][193][194][195]. For a xenon target, two-nucleon currents improve the sensitivity to spin-dependent WIMP-proton scattering by more than an order of magnitude.…”

“…This will allow one to estimate theoretical uncertainties. While nuclear structure factors obtained with ab initio many-body techniques have historically been limited to light nuclei with A ≤ 6 [192,194,228], recent progress has been significant and ab initio spin-dependent structure factors have been calculated very recently [195] with the valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group method.…”