Renormalization group effects in Dark Matter direct detection

by Fady Bishara (Oxford)

Monday 13 Jun 2016, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

seminar room 2, building 2A (DESY Hamburg)

In the search for Dark Matter (DM), complementarity plays a crucial role in identifying its putative particle nature and perhaps in unraveling the underlying model. However, complementarity between different search strategies also entails the comparison of experimental results obtained at different energy scales. Further, in direct detection, which is the topic of this talk, the scale of interaction between the DM and atomic nuclei is widely separated from the scale of the DM itself in a large class of models. In this talk, I will focus on the class of DM models where the DM candidate is in a general representation of the electroweak gauge group and has a mass of order the electroweak scale. In particular, I will describe our efforts to write down a consistent tower of effective field theories (EFTs) to connect all relevant intervening energy scales taking into account all pertinent renormalization group (RG) effects. This includes operator mixing and matching corrections. I will conclude by showing some illustrative examples where these effects are important.