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Abstract

We present nuclear structure factors that describe the generalized
spin-independent coupling of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) to
nuclei. Our results are based on state-of-the-art nuclear structure
calculations using the large-scale nuclear shell model. Starting from quark-
and gluon-level operators, we consider all possible coherently enhanced
couplings of spin-1/2 and spin-0 WIMPs to one and two nucleons up to third
order in chiral effective field theory. This includes a comprehensive
discussion of the structure factors corresponding to the leading two-nucleon
currents covering, for the first time, the contribution of spin-2 operators. We
provide results for the most relevant nuclear targets considered in present and
planned dark matter direct detection experiments: fluorine, silicon, argon, and
germanium, complementing our previous work on xenon. All results are also
publicly available in a Python notebook.