Search for Dark Matter with the CRESST III Experiment

by Jochen Schieck (Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT))

Monday 28 May 2018, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

Media room (Wigner RCP, B. 2)

The quest for the particle nature of Dark Matter is one of the big open questions of modern physics. A well motivated candidate for Dark Matter is the so-called WIMP - a weakly interactive massive particle. Recently several theoretically well-motivated models with Dark Matter candidates in a mass region below the  WIMP mass-scale gained also a lot of interest, theoretically and experimentally.  The CRESST III (Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers) experiment located at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy is optimised for the detection of the elastic scattering of these low mass Dark Matter particles with nuclei. CaWO4 crystals are used as detector medium and operated as cryogenic detectors at temperatures around 10mK. Sensitivity for nuclear recoils below 100eV was achieved, allowing for the exploration of new parameter space in the exclusion limit landscape. Besides the search for Dark Matter particles scattering with nuclei, we present a new search for so-called Dark Photons, also based on CRESST data.

 

Budapest_May_2018.pdf