Speaker
Description
CRESST (Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers) is a direct dark matter search experiment located at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory (Italy) that uses scintillating cryogenic calorimeters as target material for elastic DM-nucleus scattering. The current phase of the experiment, CRESST-III, is optimized for low-energy nuclear recoil detection. It has reached an unprecedented value of 30 eV for nuclear recoil energy thresholds on a CaWO_4 target, allowing the exploration of low-mass dark matter candidates down to 0.16 GeV/c^{2}. At higher masses the sensitivity is currently limited by a rising event rate (from threshold up to few hundreds of eV) from a so-far unknown origin. Currently dedicated measurements with upgraded detectors — including different target materials — are being performed at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory, with the goal of investigating and identifying the origin of the event excess. In this contribution, the current stage of the CRESST-III experiment, together with the most recent dark matter results, will be presented. The potential of the current data taking phase and the sensitivity projections of the next phase of the experiment will be also discussed.
