Laura Baudis

Congratulations to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis! Very good news for quantum sensor based dark matter experiments :)

Radon Removal in XENONnT down to the Solar Neutrino Level Using advanced cryogenic distillation, the XENONnT experiment cuts radon levels in its 10-tonne liquid xenon detector to just 430 atoms per tonne, enabling ultrapure conditions for detecting faint dar...

With XENONnT we reached a very low radon level, equivalent to about 430 222-Rn atoms per tonne of xenon. For the first time, the radon induced background rate is similar to the event rate due to solar neutrinos (via neutrino-electron scattering): link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...

If you’re in Zurich, support the students’ demo against budget cuts in education - October 1, Helvetiaplatz www.vauz.uzh.ch/de/News/01.1...

Full coherence at fifty – CERN Courier The CONUS+ collaboration presents evidence for CEνNS in the fully coherent regime.

CEνNS: an “act of hubris” fifty years ago, now observed by several experiments with neutrinos from stopped pion beams, nuclear reactors and the Sun: cerncourier.com/full-coheren...

A collage of photos showing scientists and engineers working at SNOLAB on the DEAP-3600 experiment. Team members in blue cleanroom suits and orange or white helmets are operating equipment, handling cryogenic systems, monitoring instruments, and connecting wires. The central images highlight the detector and filling system used for the liquid argon fill.

Fresh from the underground: the third argon fill at DEAP-3600 is now complete ✅. The detector is filled to full capacity and ready for the next steps!
Work continues at @snolabscience.bsky.social
#teamwork #darkmatter

Combined Annual Modulation Dark Matter Search with COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 Two direct-detection experiments see no evidence of a signal reported by their predecessor.

You can access the full article here:
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Very nice result from a combined analysis of the data from the ANAIS and COSINE experiments: no annual modulation in their NaI(Tl) detectors is observed

Apply for the new PhD school at GGI in Arcetri, “Theory Meets Experiments 2025 - Direct Detection across Dark Matter mass ranges” www.ggi.infn.it/showevent.pl... Deadline is October 5.

View of Bassin D’Arcachon from Cap Ferret

Nice! Find the cat here ;)

Dark matter pullover, with text on both sides, “we long to see what cannot be seen” (shown are the spaces between the letters)

Article in UZH News and here below the dark matter pullover www.news.uzh.ch/de/articles/...

WE LONG TO SEE / WHAT CANNOT BE SEEN - this was a fun project with UZH’s Arts x Science Office and the artist Andrea Mettler. First show at Mode Suisse at the Kunsthaus on September 1, next show in Osaka in late September. If I only knew how to breakdance ;-) www.art-science.uzh.ch/de/ausstellu...

4-panel Comic. (1) STUDENT: If the wavefunction only collapses when I observe it, does that mean my consciousness affects the universe? (2) [Bad:] PROFESSOR: Yes, quantum entanglement proves that we all have souls. (3) [Good:] PROFESSOR: No, consciousness plays no role here. It’s just physical measurement. (4) [Chaotic:] PROFESSOR: No. The wavefunction collapses when *I* look at it because I’m a full professor. It won’t collapse for an undergraduate.

Wavefunction Collapse

xkcd.com/3134/

Parcul natural Bucegi in Bran

They are not pets and humans should not treat them as such...

Thank you Ciaran and Daniel for pointing this out; I will look into the indirect constraints and also discuss with my theory colleagues on the project, Yonit and Ben

Yes I agree of course; answered on the other app ;)

New Device for Detecting Lightweight Dark Matter Superconducting sensors can detect single low-energy photons. Researchers have now used this capability in a dark matter experiment.

Now in PRL journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... with a slightly modified title ;) physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

mage presenting one of the speakers for the 10 Years of mesoSPIM symposium. Background of the image is a microscopy picture showing blood vessels in magenta and glial cells in cyan on a black field. On the left, the photo of the speaker is contained in a white-rimmed circle, on the right text reads: "Laura Baudis, University of Zurich, Switzerland" followed by the talk title "Probing dark matter and neutrinos with light sheet microscopy". On the bottom right reads "10 Years of mesoSPIM Symposium”

💥How can light-sheet help reveal dark matter?💥
Join Prof. Laura Baudis @lbaudis.bsky.social at #mesoSPIM Symposium, Oct 13–15 in Zurich or online, to see how light-sheet fluorescence microscopy 🔬 is used to image nuclear ☢️ recoil tracks to detect elusive particles!
Register now: t.uzh.ch/1Ss

Bran Castle, Transylvania

Interior, Bran Castle

Castelul Bran, interior

Castelul Bran, sobă

Dracula is nowhere to be seen, nor Vlad Țepeș, who never lived here. But beautiful interiors and surroundings

Munții Bucegi

Only 1000 m to go ;-)

True then, and now “Dr. Gaillard’s appointment showed that physicists did not have to be arrogant or aggressive to succeed, said Marjorie Shapiro, who was then a physics graduate student at Berkeley and who in 2004 became the first woman to chair the physics department at Berkeley.”

Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin. She captured an X-ray diffraction image of DNA and stated that a helical structure was probable. Watson and Crick then created a detailed model based on her results. They initially received credit for the discovery and were awarded the Nobel Prize after her death.🧪

Geneva old town and lake

Musee des arts et d’histoire

Happy to see many old friends and colleagues at ICRC in Geneva indico.cern.ch/event/125893...

In recent years, the focus shifted to light DM particles; this was different in the early 90s: "negative results in annihilation searches, in accelerator experiments, and in direct-detection experiments had tended to shift the focus of interest to progressively heavier WIMPs." A. Gould, APJ 1992

Cities and routes of Erasmus. Really a little hard to describe.

When the dream has always to design a subway system but your day job is keeping the Wikipedia page for Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus - commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus - up to date. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus

Hall C of LNGS in Abruzzo, Italy. It is the largest of the three main underground halls. Former home of Borexino, it will house DarkSide20k (the red structure which is the LAr cryostat), Legend-1000, and possibly Xenon-LZ-Darwin (XLZD).

It was nice to visit the underground lab with LZ and XENON colleagues ;) Hall C - shown here - is one of the sites for the future XLZD experiment.

View of Gran Sasso from L'Aquila

In the tunnel leading to the underground laboratory

Back at LNGS

Low-energy spectrum in XENONnT's first science run, showing the signal and background contributions.

XENONnT 95 % C.L. upper bound on the continuous spontaneous localization model parameters, compared to exclusion limits from other experiments and theoretical propositions.

With XENONnT data we looked for spontaneous radiation as predicted by dynamical quantum collapse models. No signal above background was observed, and we set constraints on the free parameters of two benchmark models. With leading contributions by my PhD student Alex Bismark: arxiv.org/abs/2506.05507

Slow control panel of Xenoscope

DAQ panel of Xenoscope

After the run

World-leading constraints are placed on dark-matter particles with mass between 100 keV and 1 GeV which could have been boosted to relativistic energies via collisions with cosmic rays go.aps.org/4kK20JR 🧪⚛️ #OpenAccess