Searching for dark matter

Dark matter is one of the great open mysteries of today's physics. It is expected to be responsible for most of the matter in the universe around us and yet the detection of its interaction with ordinary matter other than gravity has to this day escaped our grasp. One of the most promising alleys for finding this elusive interaction is building large-scale detectors here on Earth that would be able to measure the tiniest of signals that dark matter could produce. For understanding a signal that would come from light dark matter particles, a precise knowledge of the electronic structure of the detector material plays an essential role. We are modeling the bound-electron wavefunctions with the use of density functional theory and connecting those to quantum field theory calculations that allow us to determine the presence and the potential meaning of a dark matter signal that can be measured in such experiments.