Karlsruhe 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe

PV: Plenarvorträge

PV 7: PV VII

PV 7.2: Gruppenbericht

Donnerstag, 31. März 2011, 12:30–12:45, 30.95: 001

Results from the CRESST Dark Matter Search — •Jens Schmaler — Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, München

The CRESST experiment searches for Dark Matter particles in the form of WIMPs. These particles may be directly detectable via their scatterings off the atomic nuclei in a target material. In case of CRESST, the target is constituted by scintillating CaWO4 crystals which are operated as cryogenic calorimeters at millikelvin tempera- ture. These detectors allow to measure particle interactions via two independent signal channels: a phonon signal induced in the target crystal and a light signal due to the simultaneous emission of scintil- lation photons.

Since mid of 2009, CRESST has been collecting data with 10 such detectors, and by now a total net exposure of more than 700 kg days has been accumulated. In this talk, we report on the lat- est results from this data set. We observe a number of events in our signal region and we present estimates for background contributions to this observation. It turns out that it is difficult to explain the result by the known backgrounds only and the apparent excess of events could possibly be compatible with a low mass WIMP.