Direct Dark Matter Search with the CRESST II Experiment

Understand

The quest for the particle nature of dark matter is one of the big open questions of modern physics.

• A well motivated candidate for dark matter is the so-called WIMP - a weakly interacting massive particle.
• Recently several theoretically well-motivated models with dark matter candidates in a mass region below the WIMP mass-scale gained also a lot of interest, theoretically and experimentally.
• The CRESST II experiment located at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy is optimised for the detection of the elastic scattering of these low-mass dark matter particles with ordinary matter.