an additional signal, which is much higher for electron recoils than nuclear recoils. CRESST detectors measure the scintillation light produced in a CaWO4 or ZnWO4 absorber crystal. EDELWEISS detectors measure the ionization produced in a semiconducting germanium crystal. EURECA EURECA will take this cryogenic detector technology pioneered by CRESST and EDELWEISS further by building a 1 tonne absorber mass made up from a large number of cryogenic detector modules. The experiment plans to use a range of detector materials. This provides a way to show if a positive signal is due to dark matter, as the event rate is expected to scale with the atomic mass of the target nuclei. Whereas the event rate from neutrons will be higher for lighter nuclei. The EURECA collaboration includes the member institutions of CRESST, EDELWEISS, and ROSEBUD dark matter experiments, and some new members. These are: Oxford University Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Max-Planck-Institut für Physik München Technische Universität München Universität Tübingen Universität Karlsruhe Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe JINR Universidad de Zaragoza INR Kiev CERN The collaboration spokesman is Gilles Gerbier. The experiment will be built in the Modane Underground Laboratory, in the Fréjus road tunnel between France and Italy, the deepest underground laboratory in Europe. R&D activities EURECA researchers are currently involved in data taking and analysis for CRESST and EDELWEISS. In addition, there are various R&D activities under way associated with scaling up the detector technology to a 1-tonne scale. These include: Cryogenics: EURECA will require a one tonne mass to be cooled to millikelvin temperature. This will be done using large scale cryogenic technology, as used to cool gravitational wave experiments and the 27 km LHC accelerator ring. Scintillators: Research is being carried out to develop large radiopure absorber crystals with good scintillation properties at low temperatures. Detector readout: EURECA will require hardware and software to read-out the signals from 1000+ detector channels. See also Dark Matter Weakly Interacting Massive Particle EDELWEISS CRESST References External links EURECA Collaboration home page ASPERA: Astroparticle physics European network Experiments for dark matter search