Effective field theories for dark matter direct detection

In the interpretation of direct detection experiments scales ranging from the appearance of physics beyond the Standard Model down to nuclear energy levels matter, and for each energy region the appropriate degrees of freedoms need to be considered to extract robust constraints on the nature of dark matter. This task can be achieved by matching a tower of effective field theories that reveals how the dark matter properties are encoded in a handful of couplings accessible in experiment. In the talk I will give an overview over this approach, concentrating on the nuclear and hadronic physics required to turn limits on the direct detection rates into constraints on the dark matter parameter space.