Scintillating low-temperature calorimeters for direct dark matter search

The lack of an unambiguous signal for thermally produced dark matter particles in direct detection, indirect detection, and collider searches calls for broadening the search strategies by probing a wider range of dark matter masses with different detection techniques. One of the most common approaches is to search for nuclear recoils induced by dark matter particles scattering off the target material's nuclei. Low-temperature detectors have proven to provide the required performance to probe dark matter masses from 100 MeV/c² to 100 GeV/c² via this channel. Using scintillation light as an ancillary channel is a powerful tool for particle identification and background suppression at the keV-recoil energy scale. The CRESST-III experiment, employing scintillating cryogenic detectors with highly sensitive transition edge sensors and multi-target absorber crystals, achieved unprecedented sensitivities to explore sub-GeV dark matter masses. COSINUS, instead, is a new experiment exploiting the phonon-light technique using sodium iodide crystals with the scope to clarify the long-lasting dark matter claim of the DAMA/LIBRA collaboration. This article reviews the principle of scintillating low-temperature calorimeters with emphasis on the benefits and challenges of this technique for direct dark matter searches in light of the current status and future developments.