Carmen Carmona appointed Norman and Trygve Freed Early Career Professor in Physics
Carmen Carmona, associate professor of physics, has been honored with the Norman and Trygve Freed Early Career Professorship in Physics. Trygve Freed — whose husband Norman Freed (1936 - 2014) joined the Penn State faculty in the Department of Physics in 1965, was named Associate Dean of Penn State's Eberly College of Science in 1979, and served in that position until he retired in 2011 — established the professorship to support outstanding early-career faculty in physics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The professorship offers recognition for outstanding early accomplishments and provides financial support to encourage promising young faculty members to establish a commitment to teaching and exploring new areas of research.
Carmona is a particle astrophysicist who studies dark matter, an invisible substance estimated to makes up approximately 85 percent of the matter of the universe and, for example, shapes the form and movement of galaxes and contributes to the universe’s large-scale structure. Direct detection of dark matter has eluded scientists since its existence was first suggested in 1933, and the quest to find out what dark matter is made of is considered one of the most pressing questions in physics. Carmona helped to build and is a key member of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector located in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), a former gold mine nearly one mile underground in Lead, South Dakota. LZ is more than 100 times more sensitive than its predecessor, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, of which Carmona was also a member. She is also working on the design of the cryogenics system and detector for LZ-XENON/DARWIN (XLZD), a future next-generation xenon-based detector.
“Carmen is a very successfully experimentalist and made significant contributions to the hardware, construction, and commissioning of both LZ and LUX,” said Mauricio Terrones, George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Head of the Department of Physics at Penn State. “She has also served on the executive committee or board for both collaborations, which collectively govern more than 250 researchers. In addition to her scientific contributions, she is an excellent mentor to her graduate and undergraduate students and is an active member of the Department of Physics. We are proud to recognize her many achievements with this professorship.”
Carmona is an expert on detector hardware and operations, cryogenics, calibrations, data analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. Beyond LZ, she is leveraging her experience and expertise in developing dark matter experiments to pursue research and development that pushes the sensitivity of detectors beyond what current technology allows. In recognition of her research accomplishments, she received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2021.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Carmona was an assistant project scientist from 2014 to 2017 and a postdoctoral research associate from 2013 to 2014 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to that, Carmona was a postdoctoral research associate at Case Western University from 2009 to 2013. She earned a doctoral degree in physics in 2009, a master’s degree in physics and mathematics in 2006, and a bachelor’s degree in physics in 2004 at the University of Granada, Spain.