• teoria effettiva di campo
• interazione materia oscura nuclei

A great number of gravitational anomalies has been detected since the '30s of last century on galactic scales and over. These anomalies cannot be explained with the cosmological standard model and the standard model of particles. In the scientific community the most popular explanation for these anomalies is the existence of a new type of particle whose properties are still unknown, the dark matter (DM). In the Thesis, DM is supposed to be composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP's). Our purpose has been to study the nuclear response to WIMP scattering, assumed to be Dirac particles, using the chiral effective field theory. This response is needed to analyze the results of the various direct detection experiments, which are currently attempting to detect DM in experimental laboratories all over the world.

We have applied this program to study the scattering of WIMPs from a target of deuterons. With respect to other calculations in the literature, we have included systematically also the contributions of two body currents, and treated quark-WIMP vertex of tensor type. The WIMP-quark coupling constants can bounded by imposing that the calculated DM relic density be equal to the observed one. In this way, if dark matter is supposed to be created with a mechanism related to the thermal history of the Universe, we are able to calculate actual WIMP interaction rates, which can be directly comparable to eventual experimental limits.