Ab initio nuclear response functions for dark matter searches

Journal article, 2017

We study the process of dark matter particles scattering off He-3,He-4 with nuclear wave functions computed using an ab initio many-body framework. We employ realistic nuclear interactions derived 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 here establish a new framework for nuclear structure calculations and uncertainty quantification in the context of direct and (certain) indirect searches for dark matter.