Kavli Affiliate: Gordan Krnjaic
| First 5 Authors: Gordan Krnjaic, Duncan Rocha, Tanner Trickle, ,
| Summary:
Electronic excitations in atomic, molecular, and crystal targets are at the
forefront of the ongoing search for light, sub-GeV dark matter (DM). In many
light DM-electron interactions the energy and momentum deposited is much
smaller than the electron mass, motivating a non-relativistic (NR) description
of the electron. Thus, for any target, light DM-electron phenomenology relies
on understanding the interactions between the DM and electron in the NR limit.
In this work we derive the NR effective field theory (EFT) of general
DM-electron interactions from a top-down perspective, starting from general
high-energy DM-electron interaction Lagrangians. This provides an explicit
connection between high-energy theories and their low-energy phenomenology in
electron excitation based experiments. Furthermore, we derive Feynman rules for
the DM-electron NR EFT, allowing observables to be computed diagrammatically,
which can systematically explain the presence of in-medium screening effects in
general DM models. We use these Feynman rules to compute absorption,
scattering, and dark Thomson scattering rates for a wide variety of high-energy
DM models.
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