Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers

The Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers (CRESST) is a collaboration of European experimental particle physics groups involved in the construction of cryogenic detectors for direct dark matter searches.

The modular detectors used by CRESST facilitate discrimination of background radiation events by the simultaneous measurement of phonon and photon signals from scintillating calcium tungstate crystals.

CRESST-II Phase 1 experiment observed excess events above known background that could be understood to constitute a dark matter signal.

[4] New phase 2 results have been presented in July 2014 [5] with a limit on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering for WIMP masses below 3 GeV/c2.

In 2015 the CRESST detectors were upgraded by a sensitivity factor of 100 allowing dark-matter particles with a mass around that of a proton to be detected.

The building housing the CRESST cryostat, located in Hall A of the LNGS deep underground laboratory, Gran Sasso, Italy.