NEUTRALINO-NUCLEON SCATTERING REEXAMINED

We present a detailed discussion of the elastic scattering of a supers ymmetric neutralino off a nucleon or nucleus, with emphasis on the spi n-independent interaction. We carefully treat QCD effects on the squar k exchange contribution. In particular, we identify a class of terms t hat survive even in the absence of mixing in both the neutralino and s quark sectors; the corresponding quark and gluon operators also appear in analyses of deep-inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering (''twist-2 op erators''), so their hadronic matrix elements are well known. We also reemphasize the importance of mixing between the superpartners of left - and right-handed quarks, and of the contribution from the heavier sr -alar Higgs boson. We use our refined calculation of the scattering am plitude to update predictions of signal rates for cosmic relic neutral ino searches with germanium detectors. In general the counting rate va ries strongly with the values (even the signs) of model parameters; ty pical results lie between a few times 10(-4) and a few times 10(-1) ev ents/(kg day).