2014/11/30 by Francesco D'Eramo, Francesco D’Eramo, Massimiliano Procura · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Effective field theory #Higgs boson #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Physics beyond the Standard Model #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Renormalization #Scalar field dark matter #Standard Model (mathematical formulation) #WIMP #Weakly interacting massive particles #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep04(2015)054
published as JHEP 1504 (2015) 054 · 22 pages + appendices, 11 figures; v2, improved numerics, references added, typos corrected; v3, minor changes, journal version
openalex publication_date 2015/04/01 · arxiv created 2015/04/18 · arxiv updated 2015/04/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Direct searches for WIMPs are sensitive to physics well below the weak scale. In the absence of light mediators, it is fruitful to apply an Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach accounting only for dark matter (DM) interactions with Standard Model (SM) fields. We consider a singlet fermion WIMP and effective operators up to dimension 6 which are generated at the mass scale of particles mediating DM interactions with the SM. We perform a one-loop Renormalization Group Evolution (RGE) analysis, evolving these effective operators from the mediators mass scale to the nuclear scales probed by direct searches. We apply our results to models with DM velocity-suppressed interactions, DM couplings only to heavy quarks, leptophilic DM and Higgs portal, which without our analysis would not get constrained from direct detection bounds. Remarkably, a large parameter space region for these models is found to be excluded as a consequence of spin-independent couplings induced by SM loops. In addition to these examples, we stress that more general renormalizable models for singlet fermion WIMP can be matched onto our EFT framework, and the subsequent model-independent RGE can be used to compute direct detection rates. Our results allow us to properly connect the different energy scales involved in constraining WIMP models, and to combine information from direct detection with other complementary searches, such as collider and indirect detection.