Bridging the scales: Quantifying uncertainties of Dark Matter interactions from the fundamental level to experiments

By Christopher Körber

INT 20-2b contribution at Seattle

Keywords: Dark Matter, Uncertainty Quantification, Effective Field Theories, Open Source

bridging-the-scales

What is the nature of so-called Dark Matter, and does it interact with regular matter except through gravity? Direct detection experiments aim to answer this question. Propagating measurements (or constraints) to the fundamental theory requires bridging several scales—from target nucleus to individual nucleons to the level of quarks & gluons and beyond. However, the sheer number of parameters in model-independent descriptions of DM, and uncertainties associated with bridging the scales make it difficult to fully quantify uncertainties from theory to experiment. This talk exemplifies challenges associated with propagating uncertainties and presents an in-progress open-source and open-data meta-analysis tool for connecting strong-operators at the QCD scale to nuclear observables aiming at pinning down associated uncertainties. Since this project intends to unify efforts from different communities (from EFTs & LQCD over many-body computations to experiments), this talk addresses faced challenges and intends to spark conversations regarding community-specific interests.