Carbajo is an assistant professor at the
University of California, Los Angeles and a visiting professor at
Stanford University.[3] He is the founder and director of the Quantum Light-Matter Cooperative,[4][5][6] a scientific consortium whose mission is to understand, design, and ultimately control light-driven physical processes to help solve interconnected socio-technological challenges.[7][8] Carbajo is also the Director of Diversity at the UCLA ECE department and the founder and director of the Queered Science and Technology Center (QSTC) at UCLA. He is a topical editor of
High Power Laser Science and Engineering.[9]
Quantum Light-Matter Cooperative
The
Quantum Light-Matter Cooperative's (QLMC) focus is on the quantum coherent interplay between light and matter as a fundamental building block of a wide range of quantum phenomena of relevance to quantum information sciences and to determine and control functional properties of physical and biological systems. The QLMC areas of study include life sciences,[10][11][12][13][14]quantum,
ultrafast,
nonlinear optics,[15][16][17][18][19][20]accelerator and
X-ray sources,[21][22][23] and
chemical engineering.[24][25][26] The cooperative seeks to help solve major life and energy challenges by examining the cooperative interaction between photons and matter, and its methodologies are informed by a critically interdisciplinary approach to the science and applications of light by design.[27] Carbajo has established a framework for filming the quantum world by developing novel instruments that orchestrate and capture images of electronic, atomic, and molecular motion in action with unprecedented precision. He is an active faculty member of the
California NanoSystems Institute and the
Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.[27]
Queered Science & Technology Center
Carbajo is the director of the
Queered Science & Technology Center (QSTC)[28] at UCLA. The QSTC exists to underscore the pedagogical and epistemological centrality of critical interdisciplinarity in
STEM. It employs
queer,
radical feminist, and
black and
indigenous epistemologies to upend pervasive sexual, gendered, racialized, anthropocentric, and able-bodies logics in the
physical sciences and
science & technology policy. The QSTC employs critical frameworks to challenge and rethink knowledge production and introduces new methodological resources for critical interdisciplinarity in traditional STEM studies.[29][30][31][32]
Honors and awards
Year
Award/Honor
2024
Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award[33][34]
SPIE Early Career Achievement Award in recognition of capacity to unify ultrafast and quantum optics with X-ray science to advance the mission of Basic Energy Sciences facilities[35]
^Hussein, Rana, et al. Structural dynamics in the water and proton channels of photosystem II during the S2 to S3 transition. Nature communications 12.1 (2021): 1-16.
^Sorigué et al., Mechanism and dynamics of light-driven decarboxylation in fatty acid photodecarboxylase, Science 372, eabd5687 (2021) DOI: 10.1126/science.abd5687
^Nogly P, Weinert T, James D, Carbajo S, Ozerov D, Furrer A, Gashi D, Borin V, Skopintsev P, Jaeger K, Nass K. Retinal isomerization in bacteriorhodopsin captured by a femtosecond x-ray laser, Science 361, eaat0094 (2018)
^Kern, J., Chatterjee, R., Young, I.D., Fuller, F.D., Lassalle, L., Ibrahim, M., Gul, S., Fransson, T., Brewster, A.S., Alonso-Mori, R., Hussein, R., Carbajo S., 2018. Structures of the intermediates of Kok’s photosynthetic water oxidation clock. Nature, 563(7731), p.421.
^R Lemons, N Neveu, J Duris, A Marinelli, C Durfee, S Carbajo, Temporal shaping of narrow-band picosecond pulses via noncolinear sum-frequency mixing of dispersion-controlled pulses, Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams 25, 013401 (2022)
^Randy Lemons, Wei Liu, Josef C. Frisch, Steve Smith, Joseph Robinson, Alan Fry, and Sergio Carbajo, Integrated Structured Light Architectures, Scientific Reports volume 11, 796 (2021).
^Jingyi Tang, Randy Lemons, Wei Liu, Sharon Vetter, Timothy Maxwell, Franz-Josef Decker, Alberto Lutman, Jacek Krzywinski, Gabriel Marcus, Stefan Moeller, Zhirong Huang, Daniel Ratner, and Sergio Carbajo, Laguerre-Gaussian Mode Laser Heater for Microbunching Instability Suppression in Free Electron Lasers, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 134801(2020)
^S. Carbajo, J Schulte et al, Efficient narrowband terahertz generation in cryogenically cooled periodically poled lithium niobate, Opt. Lett. 40 (24), 5762 (2016)
^S. Carbajo, E Granados, D Schimpf, A Sell, KH Hong, J Moses, FX Kärtner, Efficient generation of ultra-intense few-cycle radially polarized laser pulses, Optics Letters 39 (8), 2487-2490 (2014)
^Liebster, N., Tang, J., Ratner, D., Liu, W., Vetter, S., Huang, Z. and Carbajo, S., 2018. Laguerre-Gaussian and beamlet array as second-generation laser heater profiles. Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, 21(9), p.090701. (2018)
^Liang Jie Wong, Kyung-Han Hong, Sergio Carbajo, Arya Fallahi, Philippe Piot, Marin Soljačić, John D. Joannopoulos, Franz X. Kärtner & Ido Kaminer, Laser-Induced Linear-Field Particle Acceleration in Free Space, Scientific Reports, 7: 11159 (2017)
^S. Carbajo, Emilio A. Nanni, Liang Jie Wong, Gustavo Moriena, Phillip D. Keathley, Guillaume Laurent, R. J. Dwayne Miller, Franz X. Kärtner, Direct longitudinal laser acceleration of electrons in free space, PRSTAB 19, 021303 (2016)
^Brian Stankus, Haiwang Yong, Nikola Zotev, Jennifer M Ruddock, Darren Bellshaw, Thomas J Lane, Mengning Liang, Sébastien Boutet, Sergio Carbajo, Joseph S Robinson, Wenpeng Du, Nathan Goff, Yu Chang, Jason E Koglin, Michael P Minitti, Adam Kirrander, Peter M Weber, Ultrafast X-ray scattering reveals vibrational coherence following Rydberg excitation, Nature Chemistry 11, pages716–721(2019).
^H. Yong et al., Ultrafast X-Ray Scattering Offers a Structural View of Excited State Charge Transfer, PNAS May 11, 2021 118 (19) e2021714118
^Stankus B, Yong H, Zotev N, Ruddock JM, Bellshaw D, Lane TJ, Liang M, Boutet S, Carbajo S, Robinson JS, Du W. Ultrafast X-ray scattering reveals vibrational coherence following Rydberg excitation. Nature Chemistry. 2019 Jul 8:1.
^
abS. Carbajo, Light by design: emerging frontiers in ultrafast photon sciences and light-matter interactions, invited perspective article in Journal of Physics: Photonics, Volume 3, Number 3 (2021)