Towards MeV direct dark matter searches

by Jochen Schieck (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Institut für Hochenergiephysik)

Monday 14 Oct 2019, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

Main/0-174 - Auditorium (Main)

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 interactive 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 nuclei and reaches the sub-GeV dark matter region. To reach mass below 100 MeV different dark matter detection techniques have to be applied, like e.g. dark matter-electron scattering. I will present a new experiment, called DANAE, based on RNDR-DEPFET silicon detectors being able to detect single electrons, which has the capability to measure dark matter down to few MeV.