Speaker
Description
CRESST (Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers) is a direct detection dark matter experiment located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy.
The experiment searches for dark matter–nucleus interactions using scintillating cryogenic calorimeters equipped with transition edge sensors (TESs), which measure phonon signals at millikelvin temperatures, complemented by the simultaneous detection of scintillation light for particle discrimination.
Thanks to this technology, CRESST achieves energy thresholds of O(10 eV), establishing it as a world-leading experiment in the sub-GeV dark matter mass regime.
CRESST continues its efforts to further lower the energy threshold, a task made increasingly challenging by the so-called low-energy excess — an exponential rise below ~200 eV in event rate at low energies, observed also by comparable experiments, whose origin remains unknown.
In this talk, I will present the latest dark matter search results and the ongoing efforts to understand and mitigate the low-energy excess.