CRESST (Dark Matter Search)

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

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 CRESST collaboration currently runs an array of cryogenic detectors in the underground laboratory of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory. 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. By cooling the detectors to temperatures of a few millikelvin, the excellent discrimination and energy resolution of the detectors allows identification of rare particle events.

The EURECA (Dark Matter Search) experiment is a planned successor to CRESST, ultimately aiming to run an array of detectors with a total mass of around 1 tonne.