Wolfgang Rau

Dr. Wolfgang Rau received his PhD from the University of Heidelberg, Germany with research performed at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (Heidelberg). After postdoctoral research at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (fellow of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisika Nucleare, Italy), the University of California, Berkeley (Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-foundation) and the Technical University of Munich, he assumed a faculty position at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON in 2006, where he held a Canada Research Chair position. In 2018 and with support of the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Institute, he moved to TRIUMF where he now holds a Senior Research Scientist position.

Rau has dedicated his research career to astroparticle physics, starting with the investigation of solar neutrinos with the experiments GALLEX, GNO and Borexino, all located at the Gran Sasso laboratory. With his move to Berkeley, he entered the world of direct dark matter detection, joining the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment. His focus has since been on the operation and characterization of cryogenic detectors and developing new analysis methods. In this function he also contributed to CRESST, is a co-founder and member of SuperCDMS and the director of the Cryogenic Underground TEst facility (CUTE) at SNOLAB.

Recently, Rau has also became involved with other projects using cryogenic detectors such as BeEST, using Superconducting Tunnel Junctions, and a project using CUTE to investigate superconducting qubits.