Hans Kraus

Abstract:

EURECA (European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array) is an astro-particle physics facility aiming to directly detect galactic dark matter. The Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane has been selected as host laboratory. The EURECA collaboration unites CRESST, EDELWEISS and the Spanish-French experiment ROSEBUD, thus concentrating and focussing effort on cryogenic detector research in Europe into a single facility. EURECA will use a target mass of up to one ton, enough to explore WIMP - nucleon scalar scattering cross sections in the region of 10-9 - 10-10 picobarn. A major advantage of EURECA is the planned use of more than just one target material (multi target experiment for WIMP identification). © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.

Abstract:

The latest results on the low-temperature characterisation of scintillation materials selected for rare event search are reviewed. The temperature dependences of the light output and decay time are analysed on the basis of the current understanding of the underlying physical processes that control the emission of light in solids. It is shown that scintillation properties of the materials under study are adequate for the purpose of cryogenic experiments searching for rare events. From the analysis of the performance characteristics it is concluded that currently ZnWO4 is the most suitable scintillation target for dark matter search.