Equipment & Facilities

Center laboratories are housed in the Physical Sciences Laboratory Building and Overman Hall and are well equipped with specialized facilities necessary to support cutting edge research in the photochemical sciences. 

The Center has major installations for UV-VIS, NIR, IR, IR transient absorption, and visible fluorescence measurements on the femtosecond to millisecond timescales with other instrumentation including:

• 300, 400, and 500 MHz NMR spectrometers (the latter equipped with a cryoprobe for ultrasensitive measurements).
• MALDI-TOF and GC/MS systems with DI probes as well as LC/MS and ESI and APCI                
• CNS Elemental Analyzer
• Gel permeation and gas chromatographs                 
• HPLC chromatographs                 
• FT-IR spectrometers                 
• UV-VIS, near-IR spectrophotometers                 
• Automated peptide synthesizer                
• Dual Beam,Scanning UV-Vis spectrophotometer, 200nm~800nm, Suitable for most bio-research laboratory work                 
• Isothermal Titration Calorimeter (ITC) - MicroCal VP-ITC which allows a simultaneous determination of all binding parameters (equilibrium constant, enthalpy of binding and stoichiometry of the interaction) in a single experiment - information unobtainable from more limited binding assays               
• State-of-the-art microscopes including confocal scanning and fluorescence imaging, single-molecule spectroscopic imaging, scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy, confocal Raman spectroscopy/imaging, and fluorescence lifetime/spectral imaging                
• Several broad-band tunable femtosecond laser systems equipped with one or more optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) and associated optics permitting pump and probe light pulses throughout the electromagnetic spectrum
• Multiple Nd: YAG laser systems outfitted with optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) that permit variable excitation nanosecond pulse energies tunable from the UV to the near-IR           
• Mbraun glove box (dry box), which includes freezer (-30 °C)
  
• MB-SPS solvent purification system                  
• Lindberg blue vacuum sublimation system           
• Differential scanning calorimeter             
• Materials processing, device fabrication and characterization facilities
  
• LCPP cluster: a 48-processor, 96-core Linux-enterprise based computer cluster based on Intel-Woodcrest-5160 and Intel-Clovertown-5355 64-bit CPUs
  
• Multi-angle and quasi-elastic light scattering analyzers
  

Support facilities within the Center include a machine shop and an electronics shop.  Electronics technicians and machinists not only maintain instruments, but also design and build custom equipment.