COSINUS - approaching the long-standing dark matter claim of DAMA/LIBRA from a unique perspective

by Karoline Schaeffner (GSSI - Gran Sasso Science Institute)

Tuesday 17 Jul 2018, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - ED. G.Marconi)

The nature of dark matter, despite enormous progress in direct searches, is still undiscovered. Most prominently, the results from DAMA/LIBRA, since more than two decades, create a controversial situation in the field. COSINUS aims to disentangle this inconsistency by providing a fully model-independent clarification of the DAMA claim. To exclude material effects, COSINUS will use crystals of sodium iodide, just as DAMA. Yet, COSINUS will not operate them as mere scintillation detectors, but as so-called cryogenic scintillating calorimeters operated at milli-Kelvin temperatures and providing a coincident, independent measurement of both the temperature signal and the scintillation light signal caused by a particle interaction. Since the amount of produced light depends on the particle type (light quenching), this yields identification of the type of interacting particle on an event-by-event basis. In this talk I will present the achieved results of our first generation detectors as well as future steps and prospects.