laura baudis

laura

Please note that this is my old website. My new site can be reached at this link.

my main research interests are particle astrophysics and cosmology, in particular the domain of particle dark matter

the nature of dark matter in our galaxy is one of the great unresolved problems in science and several lines of evidence suggest that most of it might be non-baryonic. attractive candidates for non-baryonic dark matter are slow thermal relics born in an early phase of the universe. these so called wimps (weakly interactive massive particles) also arise in supersymmetric models as neutralinos (the lightest supersymmetric particles), independently from cosmological considerations.

direct detection of wimps can occur in very low background experiments, where the elastic wimp scattering off target nuclei is exploited.

another question of cosmological relevance is the mass scale of the neutrino. while neutrino oscillation experiments deliver strong evidence that neutrinos are massive, they can not pin down the neutrino mass, being sensitive only to mass square differences. a sensitive tool to gain information about the absolute neutrino mass scale if neutrinos are majorana particles is neutrinoless double beta decay. the extremely rare nuclear decay process (half life > 10²⁵ yr - much larger that the age of the universe!) transforms two neutrons into two protons and two electrons. the right-handed antineutrino emitted at the first vertex is absorbed as a lefthanded neutrino at the second vertex. the process violates b-l (which is conserved in the standard model) and any theory that contains lepton number violating interactions can lead to it. however, independently of the underlying mechanism, an observation of the neutrinoless double beta decay would be evidence for a nonzero majorana neutrino mass.

my present work concentrates on the direct detection of non-baryonic dark matter (wimps) with the cryogenic dark matter search experiment (CDMS) and with liquid Xenon (XENON). in the past, i was involved in direct dark matter detection and neutrinoless double decay experiments with high-purity ge diodes, such as the heidelberg-moscow experiment, the heidelberg dark matter search experiment (hdms) and the genius project.