Nuclear σ terms and scalar-isoscalar WIMP-nucleus interactions from lattice QCD
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Beane-2014-Nuclear sigma terms.pdf
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Author(s)
Beane, S. R.
Cohen, S. D.
Lin, H.-W.
Savage, M. J.
Detmold, William
Date Issued
April 2014
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Beane, S. R., S. D. Cohen, W. Detmold, H.-W. Lin, and M. J. Savage. “Nuclear σ Terms and Scalar-Isoscalar WIMP-Nucleus Interactions from Lattice QCD.” Phys. Rev. D 89, no. 7 (April 2014). © 2014 American Physical Society
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Final published version
Abstract
It has been argued that the leading scalar-isoscalar weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) -nucleus interactions receive parametrically enhanced contributions in the context of nuclear effective field theories [1]. These contributions arise from meson-exchange currents (MECs) and potentially modify the impulse approximation estimates of these interactions by 10%–60%. We point out that these MECs also contribute to the quark mass dependence of nuclear binding energies, that is, nuclear σ terms. In this work, we use recent lattice QCD calculations of the binding energies of the deuteron, [superscript 3]He and [superscript 4]He at pion masses near 500 and 800 MeV, combined with the experimentally determined binding energies at the physical point, to provide approximate determinations of the σ terms for these light nuclei. For each nucleus, we find that the deviation of the corresponding nuclear σ term from the single-nucleon estimate is at the few-percent level, in conflict with the conjectured enhancement. As a consequence, lattice QCD calculations currently indicate that the cross sections for scalar-isoscalar WIMP-nucleus interactions arising from fundamental WIMP interactions with quarks do not suffer from significant uncertainties due to enhanced MECs.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.074505
