Light Dark Matter in the light of CRESST-II

TL;DR

The CRESST-II experiment observed an excess of events potentially indicating light dark matter, but this cannot be fully reconciled with other experiments' null results within the studied models.

Contribution

This paper analyzes CRESST-II dark matter data in the context of various models, highlighting the challenges in reconciling it with other experimental results.

Findings

CRESST-II excess could be due to light dark matter.

Inelastic and isospin-violating models offer partial consistency.

Full reconciliation with other experiments remains elusive.

Abstract

Recently the CRESST collaboration has published the long anticipated results of their direct Dark Matter (DM) detection experiment with a CaWO_4 target. The number of observed events exceeds known backgrounds at more than 4 sigma significance, and this excess could potentially be due to DM scattering. We confront this interpretation with null results from other direct detection experiments for a number of theoretical models, and find that consistency is achieved in non-minimal models such as inelastic DM and isospin-violating DM. In both cases mild tension with constraints remain. The CRESST data can, however, not be reconciled with the null results and with the positive signals from DAMA and CoGeNT simultaneously in any of the models we study.