Authors: French Physical Society, Swiss Physical Society
The Charpak-Ritz Prize 2022 awarded to Laura Baudis, for her leadership in international astro-particle physics
collaborations, outreach activities and seminal contributions to dark
matter research.
Laura Baudis is awarded with the 2022 Charpak Ritz Price jointly given by the French Physical Society and the Swiss Physical Society.
She has provided significant contributions to an increasingly burning
question in astrophysics and cosmology: What holds cosmological
structures together and controls the formation and evolution of
galaxies, including our own Milky Way? It remains an enigma that the
abundance of all known forms of matter is too low to explain the level
of gravitational interaction observed in galaxies, clusters of galaxies
and at the largest scales in the universe. This has triggered the
hypothesis of ‘dark matter’, which is undetectable by electromagnetic
interactions. The dark matter, which accounts for 85% of all matter in
the universe, could be made of new elementary particles, such as Weakly
Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The search for WIMPs has been a
main pillar of Laura Baudis’ career.
For more than a decade,
experiments using two-phase (liquid and gas) xenon time projection
chambers (TPCs) have yielded the world’s best sensitivity in the direct
detection of WIMPs. Laura Baudis, who is a professor at University of
Zürich, has played a leading role in the development of large xenon
detectors with ultra-low backgrounds at their core. These are part of
the collaborative XENON programme, which started with XENON10, recently
operated XENON1T and currently acquires data with XENONnT. XENON1T
reached the lowest background ever observed in a dark matter detector
and observed the very rare two-neutrino double electron capture process
in xenon-124, an outstanding result in nuclear physics. XENON1T is
currently world-leading in providing the strongest constraints on WIMP
interactions over a broad mass range. To improve the statistical
sensitivity even further towards a possible detection of dark matter, an
upscaled experiment XENONnT was prepared and started in 2021. Apart
from her leading contributions to the TPCs, including the photosensor
arrays to observe the xenon scintillation light in the VUV region, Laura
Baudis has been assuming key roles in the collaboration: as
co-spokesperson, chair of the collaboration board and recently as chair
of the science strategy team. Towards the next generation effort DARWIN,
which she also co-founded, Laura Baudis has developed crucial
experimental setups and prototypes to selectively detect rare photon and
electron emission events in a large volume of liquid xenon as a
characteristic WIMP signature. It is also important to note that within
these larger multi-national research projects a significant part of
Laura Baudis’ work has been performed in collaboration with French
researchers at LPNHE in Paris and the SUBATECH laboratory in Nantes.
Next
to her complex multi-lateral scientific efforts, Laura Baudis has also
been actively involved in outreach activities, giving a TED talk and she
features in two documentary movies about Science and Scientists
(“Chasing Einstein”, “Eros und Atome” – in German).
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