Experimental Particle Astrophysics

Laura Baudis is a professor of experimental physics at the University of Zurich, where she has led research in astroparticle physics since joining the Physics Department in August 2007.  She received her PhD in 1999 from the University of Heidelberg and continued as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, contributing to the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment. In 2004, she became an assistant professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she began pioneering work on liquid xenon detectors - starting  with XENON10 , the first phase of the XENON program. In 2006, she was awarded the Lichtenberg Professorship for Astroparticle Physics at the RWTH, Aachen University. A recognized leader in the field of direct dark matter detection, she currently serves as spokesperson of the DARWIN collaboration, which is driving the development of XLZD, a next-generation liquid xenon observatory. Her contributions have been recognized by several honors: she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, and the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017 for the Xenoscope project, which supports critical R&D for DARWIN/XLZD. In 2022, she was awarded the Charpak–Ritz Prize by the French and Swiss Physical Societies.

I'm an experimental particle astrophysicist with a deep interest in the nature of dark matter, the fundamental properties of neutrinos, and the development of advanced particle detection technologies.

I contribute to the XENON project, one of the world’s leading direct detection experiments for dark matter, and to LEGEND, which searches for neutrinoless double beta decay to probe the nature of neutrinos. I also lead the DARWIN collaboration, an R&D initiative paving the way for XLZD (XENON-LZ-DARWIN), a next-generation, 80-tonne liquid xenon observatory in astroparticle physics. At the University of Zurich, I run a dedicated R&D program to explore the fundamental properties of liquid xenon as a particle detection medium, and to develop light sensors for future rare event experiments.

You can find a  list of my publications here. I regularly givetalks, public lectures, and interviews. Here is a selection of outreach contributions: interview for the Swiss Academy of Sciences, an interview for Springer Nature and one in Context (in German)and in GEOkompakt: Die verborgenen Kräfte im Kosmos. My TEDxCERN talk on Exploring the vast dark Universe. An interview for JPhys+ and an interview for the faculty of science. A short documentary movie about Schrödinger and his equation in Arosa, and a movie about Einstein and the photoelectric effect. Here is my article on the Search for Dark Matter for the European Review and my review for the  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A on Dual-phase xenon time projection chambers for rare-event searches.