Speaker
Description
The CRESST-III experiment searches for direct interactions of dark matter with ordinary matter at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy. The main event signature would be a nuclear recoil in the scintillating target crystals.
Operating the crystals as cryogenic calorimeters at O (10 mK), CRESST-III can simultaneously measure the phonon signal from CaWO4 and the emitted scintillation light in a separate cryogenic light detector. This provides particle discrimination on an event-by-event basis allowing for and active discrimination of backgrounds.
CRESST-III focuses on the sub-GeV/c mass region where the sensitivity is driven by the threshold. With a CaWO4 crystal of 24 g as target an unprecedented low threshold of 30 eV for nuclear recoils was obtained in the first data taking campaign of CRESST-III from 2016-2018.
In this contribution, the status of the experiment will be reported, together with the latest results both on spin-dependent and spin-independent searches.
