Surface roughness interpretation of 730 kg days CRESST-II results

Abstract

The analysis presented in the recent publication of the CRESST-II results finds a statistically significant excess of registered events over known background contributions in the acceptance region and attributes the excess to a possible Dark Matter signal, caused by scattering of relatively light WIMPs. We propose a mechanism which explains the excess events with ion sputtering caused by 206Pb recoils and alpha particles from 210Po decay, combined with realistic surface roughness effects.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures. v2: corrected quenching factor discussion. v3: corrected references. v4: added reference