Speaker
Description
The CRESST experiment, located at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, searches for dark matter particles via their elastic scattering off nuclei in a target material.
The CRESST target consists of scintillating CaWO$_4$ crystals, which are operated as cryogenic calorimeters at millikelvin temperatures. Each interaction in the CaWO$_4$ target crystal produces a phonon signal and a light signal that is measured by a second cryogenic calorimeter.
With the CRESST-II result in 2015, the experiment is leading the field of direct dark matter search for dark matter masses below 1.7GeV/c$^2$ , extending for the first time the reach of a direct search to the sub-GeV/c$^2$ mass region.
For CRESST-III, whose Phase 1 started data taking in August 2016, detectors have been optimized to reach the performance required to further probe the low-mass region with unprecedented sensitivity.
In this contribution the achievements of the CRESST-III detectors will be thoroughly discussed together with preliminary results and perspectives of Phase 1.
