Graduate Program Events |
Turning our attention from neutrinos to dark matter, I will then describe my work on quantifying uncertainties in direct detection dark matter experiments stemming from uncertainties in nuclear modeling. As these experiments shift from considering only the spin-independent and spin-dependent operators to a complete set of operators coupling dark matter to nuclei, it becomes especially important to understand all sources of uncertainty. I will explain how we calculated the nuclear model uncertainties for xenon, a common choice of target in direct detection experiments, and how these uncertainties can be significantly large for certain operators.