Prospects for direct detection of dark matter in an effective theory approach

Understand

We perform the first comprehensive analysis of the prospects for direct detection of dark matter with future ton-scale detectors in the general 11-dimensional effective theory of isoscalar dark matter-nucleon interactions mediated by a heavy spin-1 or spin-0 particle.

• The theory includes 8 momentum and velocity dependent dark matter-nucleon interaction operators, besides the familiar spin-independent and spin-dependent operators.
• From a variegated sample of 27 benchmark points selected in the parameter space of the theory, we simulate independent sets of synthetic data for ton-scale Germanium and Xenon detectors.
• From the synthetic data, we then extract the marginal posterior probability density functions and the profile likelihoods of the model parameters.