Speaker
Description
Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) remain one of the leading candidates for dark matter. One aspect of the search for such particles is direct detection, where terrestrial detectors aim to observe or constrain interactions between WIMPs and nuclei. This requires the application of a nuclear structure model in order to effectively predict the potential nuclear responses to WIMP interactions. To date, this has been achieved using the nuclear shell model. However, for heavily deformed nuclei far from magic numbers, mean-field models of nuclear structure are often more suitable. This approach however requires the development and application of beyond-mean-field methods of projection on nuclear angular momentum and particle number in order to account for spin-dependent nuclear responses and the effects of nucleon pairing. We present here our preliminary work in this area, using the nucleus Argon-40 as a test-case.