München 2006 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 6: Kern- und Teilchen-Astrophysik

HK 6.2: Gruppenbericht

Montag, 20. März 2006, 14:30–15:00, E

EURECA: The Future of Cryogenic Dark Matter Search in Europe — •Wolfgang Rau — Physik-Department E15, Technische Universität München, James-Franck-Str., 85748 Garching

Strong observational evidence points towards the existence of large amounts of a so far unknown type of non-baryonic matter, not accessible to direct astronomical observations (hence called Dark Matter), which dominates the matter content in the Universe. Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics predict the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). These particles are among the best motivated candidates to solve the Dark Matter problem.

Many experiments started to directly search for WIMPs via a possible interaction with nuclei. Cryogenic detectors, measuring the energy deposition via thermal signal and discriminating ionizing background events via a second, scintillation or ionization signal provide presently the best sensitivity, just entering the parameter range of interest for supersymmetric WIMPs. To explore the most interesting parameter range larger experiments are necessary. EURECA is a new project, based on the WIMP search experiments CRESST and EDELWEISS, aiming for a ∼1 ton cryogenic detector to explore most of the parameter region predicted by supersymmetry.