Journal of High Energy Physics (Nov 2021)

Dark matter electromagnetic dipoles: the WIMP expectation

  • Thomas Hambye,
  • Xun-Jie Xu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2021)156
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2021, no. 11
pp. 1 – 28

Abstract

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Abstract We perform a systematic study of the electric and magnetic dipole moments of dark matter (DM) that are induced at the one-loop level when DM experiences four-fermion interactions with Standard Model (SM) charged fermions. Related to their loop nature these moments can largely depend on the UV completion at the origin of the four-fermion operators. We illustrate this property by considering explicitly two simple ways to generate these operators, from t- or s-channel tree-level exchange. Fixing the strength of these interactions from the DM relic density constraint, we obtain in particular a magnetic moment that, depending on the interaction considered, lies typically between 10 −20 to 10 −23 ecm or identically vanishes. These non-vanishing values induce, via photon exchange, DM-nucleus scattering cross sections that could be probed by current or near future direct detection experiments.

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