Many-body atomic response functions for direct searches of light dark matter and detection of solar neutrinos

Cheng-Pang Liu^1*

¹Physics, National Dong Hwa University, Shoufeng, Hualien, Taiwan

* Presenter:Cheng-Pang Liu, email:cpliu@mail.ndhu.edu.tw

Direct searches for light dark matter of sub-GeV masses in our galaxy and detection of low energy neutrinos, such as the solar ones, have been actively pursued in astro-particle physics. As the primary observables, the electronic recoils in detectors, are of similar order to atomic scales, the interpretation of experimental results needs theory predictions of scattering or absorption rates of these incident particles by atomic electrons, for which the knowledge of atomic structure plays a crucial part.

Our collaboration, the Theoretical Dark Matter Collaboration (TDMC), has been working on these challenging problems for a decade. Benefited by having many-body theory experts in our team, we are able to apply state-of-the-art atomic calculations, which are justified by benchmarking with known data, and have studied a number of major reaction channels, with some of our results being used by experimentalists as current standards.

In this talk, after reviewing our methodology and past accomplishments, I will discuss our recent, still in progress, major efforts towards building a comprehensive database of atomic response functions. The goal will be to provide major experiments with a set of well-tested, unified theory inputs for their ambitious search programs.

Keywords: dark matter, neutrinos, atomic structure, many-body physics