26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Beyond Mean-Field Nuclear Structure for Dark Matter Direct Detection

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Nuclear and Particle Physics (NUPP)

Speaker

Navneet Krishnan (Australian National University)

Description

Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) remain one of the leading candidates for dark matter. One aspect of the search for such particles is direct detection, where terrestrial detectors aim to observe or constrain interactions between WIMPs and nuclei. This requires the application of a nuclear structure model in order to effectively predict the potential nuclear responses to WIMP interactions. To date, this has been achieved using the nuclear shell model. However, for heavily deformed nuclei far from magic numbers, mean-field models of nuclear structure are often more suitable. This approach however requires the development and application of beyond-mean-field methods of projection on nuclear angular momentum and particle number in order to account for spin-dependent nuclear responses and the effects of nucleon pairing. We present here our new work in this area, applied to nuclei commonly used in direct detection.