Chiral Effective Theory for Spin-1 Dark Matter- Nucleon Scattering

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the elusive dark matter via formulation of its interaction with normal matter. This approach is commonly known as direct detection which is an active field of dark matter research, both theoretically and experimentally. We treat the dark matter as a heavy complex vector field, corresponding to a massive spin-1 particle, which weakly interacts with a nucleus. The thesis utilizes effective field theory and chiral perturbation theory to create a general interaction Lagrangian. Starting in a relativistic approach, quantum mechanical interaction operators are found which in turn can be used to calculate scattering amplitudes. The thesis assumes non-relativistic and heavy dark matter to perform a non-relativistic reduction which aims to investigate what constraints and bounds created in the relativistic regime that lives on in the non-relativistic limit. The results are compared to previous work within the field which leads to a comprehensive analysis of the situation.