NEW CONTRIBUTIONS TO COHERENT NEUTRALINO-NUCLEUS SCATTERING

We discuss coherent scattering between supersymmetric neutralinos and nuclei via an effective neutralino-gluon interaction. We extend existi ng calculations by evaluating all relevant one-loop diagrams, without resorting to an expansion in the inverse squark mass. We find new cont ributions to the effective neutralino-gluon Lagrangian that are nonzer o even in the absence of mixing in both the squark and neutralino sect ors. The new contributions can be numerically important, and can even dominate the total amplitude. This affects the calculation of event ra tes in experiments searching for direct or indirect evidence of cosmic relic neutralinos.