The CRESST-III experiment which is dedicated to low-mass dark matter search uses scintillating CaWO4 crystals operated as cryogenic particle detectors. Background discrimination is achieved by exploiting the scintillating light signal of CaWO4 and by a novel active detector holder presented in this paper. In a test setup above ground, a nuclear-recoil energy threshold of Eth=(190.6±5.2)eV is reached with a 24g prototype detector, which corresponds to an estimated threshold of ∼50eV when being operated in the low-noise CRESST cryostat. This is the lowest threshold reported for direct dark matter searches. For CRESST-III phase 1, ten such detector modules were installed in the cryostat which have the potential to improve significantly the sensitivity to scatterings of dark matter particles with masses down to ∼0.1GeV/c2.
@article{arxiv.1802.08639,
title = {A prototype detector for the CRESST-III low-mass dark matter search},
author = {R. Strauss and G. Angloher and P. Bauer and X. Defay and A. Erb and F. v. Feilitzsch and N. Ferreiro Iachellini and R. Hampf and D. Hauff and M. Kiefer and J. -C. Lanfranchi and A. Langenkämper and E. Mondragon and A. Münster and C. Oppenheimer and F. Petricca and W. Potzel and F. Pröbst and F. Reindl and J. Rothe and S. Schönert and W. Seidel and H. Steiger and L. Stodolsky and A. Tanzke and H. H. Trinh Thi and A. Ulrich and S. Wawoczny and M. Willers and M. Wüstrich and A. Zöller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.08639},
year = {2018}
}