Instrumentation and Facilities


Overview

Located in Hutchison Hall on the University of Rochester's River Campus, the Chemistry Department's modern instrumentation facility provides a stimulating work environment and is equipped with a wide variety of sophisticated research instrumentation for spectroscopy, analysis, and computation. All of the departmental instruments are used by students and faculty in a "hands-on" way, and most are available 24 hours a day. The opportunities for student use of major state-of-the-art instrumentation represents one of the special strengths of Rochester Chemistry. The Department acquires the most up-to-date equipment through a series of instrumentation grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other donors.

Many of the Department's instruments are highly specialized and in some cases unique, designed and built on site or substantially modified from commercially available instruments to meet the specific needs of the Department's researchers. Staff members are available to train new users, help with troubleshooting, and offer advice on special problems, but the actual measurements are carried out by the individual researchers and the students they mentor. Students learn the theory and practice of a broad range of instrumental techniques in the course of carrying out their research.

Several groups in the Department collaborate with scientists and students at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, an interdisciplinary facility on the University of Rochester campus which conducts cutting-edge research in ultrafast optics and electronics as well as laser fusion.

Current Equipment

NMR Spectrometers:

  • Varian 500 MHz spectrometer
  • Brüker 500 MHz spectrometer
  • Two Brüker 400 MHz spectrometers
  • Brüker 300 MHz spectrometer

Mass Spectrometers:

  • Agilent LC/MS
  • Brüker 500 MHz spectrometer
  • Shimadzu GC/MS, with dual columns, +&- CI
  • Shimadzu GC/MS, with direct injection probe, +&- CI

Laser Systems:

The Department maintains laser systems for absorption, fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopies, nonlinear four-wave mixing, electro-optic sampling, time-resolved electron diffraction, photoelectron spectroscopy, temperature-jump studies, photoacoustic calorimetry, and the initiation of photochemistry:

  • Two kHz regeneratively amplified femtosecond titanium:sapphire lasers, one with an optical parametric amplifier for generation of continuously tunable UV, visible and infra-red femtosecond pulses.
  • Transient absorption systems based on a picosecond Nd:YAG laser and a nanosecond excimer-pumped dye laser.
  • Picosecond time-correlated single photon counting fluorescence system based on a Nd:YLF-pumped cavity-dumped dye laser.
  • Laser Raman facility.
  • Nd:YAG/dye laser system.
  • Associated optical instruments: monochromators and spectrographs, fast multichannel plate photodetectors, and state-of-the-art, highly sensitive array detectors (CCDs and photodiode arrays).

Computational Facilities:

  • Western Scientific Beowulf cluster - 24 dual-Opteron blades, each with 1 GB DRAM.
  • Teaching classroom with 6 Dell systems, dual Xeon (Woodcrest) CPUs, 4GB DRAM each. One machine has 16 GB DRAM for processing larger jobs, and dual 500-GB hard drives for unified data storage.

Other Instruments Include:

  • REACT IR: infrared spectrometer with probes for remote monitoring and recording of spectra over time
  • Thermogravimetric analysis and Differential Scanning Calorimetry for polymer characterization
  • Brüker ESP-300 ESR spectrometer
  • Digital Instruments Nanoscope IIa Atomic Force Microscope
  • Ellipsometer
  • Single molecule time-resolved fluorescence confocal microscope
  • Spectrofluorometer from Roper Scientific, infrared and visible
  • Four Shimadzu FT-IR spectrometers
  • Many UV-Vis spectrometers