E-grāmata: Heavy WIMP Effective Theory: Formalism and Applications for Scattering on Nucleon Targets

This book is about dark matter"s particle nature and the implications of a new symmetry that appears when a hypothetical dark matter particle is heavy compared to known elementary particles. Dark matter exists and composes about 85% of the matter in the universe, but it cannot be explained in terms of the known elementary particles. Discovering dark matter"s particle nature is one of the most pressing open problems in particle physics. This thesis derives the implications of a new symmetry that appears when the hypothetical dark matter particle is heavy compared to the known elementary particles, a situation which is well motivated by the null results of searches at the LHC and elsewhere. The new symmetry predicts a universal interaction between dark matter and ordinary matter, which in turn may be used to determine the event rate and detectable energy in dark matter direct detection experiments. The computation of heavy wino and higgsino dark matter presented in this work has bec

ome a benchmark for the field of direct detection. This thesis has also spawned a new field of investigation in dark matter indirect detection, determining heavy WIMP annihilation rates using effective field theory methods. It describes a new formalism for implementing Lorentz invariance constraints in nonrelativistic theories, with a surprising result at 1/M^4 order that contradicts the prevailing ansatz in the past 20 years of heavy quark literature. The author has also derived new perturbative QCD results to provide the definitive analysis of key Standard Model observables such as heavy quark scalar matrix elements of the nucleon. This is an influential thesis, with impacts in dark matter phenomenology, field theory formalism and precision hadronic physics.

Heavy WIMP Effective Theory.- Introduction.- Universal heavy WIMP limit.- Motivations for heavy WIMP effective theory.- Chapter organization.- Heavy-Particle Spacetime Symmetries and Building Blocks.- Finite dimensional representations of the Lorentz algebra.- Effective field theory and the little group.- Reparametrization invariance and invariant operators.- Higher-spin and self-conjugate fields.- NRQED example: Lagrangian.- NRQED example: Relativistic invariance.- NRQED example: one-photon matching.- NRQED example: photon and four-fermion sectors.- Discussion.- Effective Theory at the Weak-Scale.- Singlet.- Multiplets and Mixtures.- Onshell Renormalization Scheme.- Low Energy theory at the weak scale for pure- and mixed-state WIMPs.- Weak-Scale Matching.- Singlet.- Multiplets and mixtures.- QCD Analysis and Hadronic Matrix Elements.- Operator renormalization.- Renormalization group evolution.- Threshold matching and low energy coefficients.- Hadronic matrix elements.- Heavy WIMP

-Nucleon Scattering Cross Sections.- Cross section assembly line.- Survey of uncertainties.- Cross section predictions and consistency checks.- Conclusions.