Dark matter scattering off $$ ^{4}$$ 4 He in chiral effective field theory

Abstract

Abstract We study dark matter scattering off $$ ^4$$ 4 He and other light nuclei using chiral effective field theory. We consider scalar DM interactions and include both one- and two-nucleon scattering processes. The DM interactions and nuclear wave functions are obtained from chiral effective field theory and we work up to fourth order in the chiral expansion for the latter to investigate the chiral convergence. The results for the scattering rates can be used to determine the sensitivity of planned experiments to detect relatively light dark matter particles using $$ ^4$$ 4 He. We find that next-to-leading-order scalar currents are smaller than expected from power counting for scattering off $$ ^4$$ 4 He confirming earlier work. However, the results for two-nucleon corrections exhibit a linear regulator dependence indicating potential problems in the applied power counting. We observe a linear correlation between the, in principle not observable, D-wave probability of various light nuclei and the scalar two-nucleon matrix elements, again pointing towards potentially missing contributions.