Laura Baudis is a physicist looking for dark matter deep underground. “The nature of the matter which holds galaxies together is one of the greatest unresolved problems in science,” Baudis said. Dark matter may evade all ordinary sensors and detectors, but even it can’t escape the pull of the most notorious force in the universe—gravity. Gravity allows physicists to map the massive fingerprint left by dark matter all over the cosmos. Baudis a professor at the Physik Institut at the university of Zurich and a specialist in weakly interacting particles, such as neutrinos and dark matter. She is developing an extremely sensitive and subterranean liquid Xeon detector which will catch any particles that wiz through it. If dark matter can interact with ordinary matter as many theoriest predict, Baudis’ hopes her new detector will see it.

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