Facillities

Facilities and equipment
Facilities are certainly a major and essential part of our research programs and are described below. These are all available in the PI’s labs.

2500 sq. ft. lab space is used for photonic materials and polymer synthesis, equipped with five fume hoods with Schlenck vacuum and inert atmosphere lines, rotary evaporators, drying ovens, vacuum ovens, refrigerators, balances, column and thin layer chromatography equipment, glovebox, Parr hydrogenator, and a Parr high pressure autoclave. Instrumentation in the lab includes a PTI steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence spectrometer, Agilent UV-vis diode array spectrophotometer, Waters and Perkin Elmer HPLCs with UV and RI detectors, Perkin Elmer capillary GC with flame ionization detector, ADA/NIST Model 520 mercury dilatometer, Instron tensile tester, spin coaters, Carver compression molding press, Rayonett photochemical reactor, Hanovia low and medium pressure Hg lamps, Locktite UV and visible photochemical lamps, TA Instruments TGA, DSC, DMA, and ARES rheometer, and an Ocean Optics model SD-2000 dual channel fiber optic UV-visible and fluorescence emission spectrometer, and an integrated confocal Raman microscope (Labram, Jabin-SPEX) equipped with a Pellier Cooled-CCD.

Spinning Disk Confocal Microscopic Imaging: Confocal microscopy offers several advantages over conventional widefield optical microscopy, including the ability to control depth of field, elimination or reduction of background information away from the focal plane (that leads to image degradation), and the capability to collect serial optical sections from thick specimens. In conventional fluorescence microscopy, the inside structure of a thick specimen cannot be observed clearly because of the significant contribution of out of focus light from above and below the focal plane. The disk scan unit makes it possible to reject this out of focus light by placing a rotating, slit disk in a confocal plane of the microscope. The result is a clear, continuous, optically cross-sectioned image that can be imaged up to 30 frames/s with a cooled EM-CCD. Every image acquired by the camera has the confocal effect alleviating the need for post image processing,thus improving data reliability for 3-D images. We have an Olympus DSU spinning disk confocal microscopy system based on an IX-81 inverted microscope platform.

Multiphoton Microscopic Imaging: The Olympus FluoView 300 is a point-scanning, point-detection, confocal laser scanning microscope designed for biology research applications. In this lab, a Coherent 10W Verdi pumped Mira 900-F Ti:sapphire femtosecond laser system coupled to a modified Olympus inverted confocal microscope FV300 is currently used for 2-photon (or multiphoton) fluorescence imaging, 3D optical data storage, stereolithography with photopolymerizable materials. A second-harmonic generator and a pulse picker (both from APE, Germany) are also equiped in this lab to expand the ability of the imaging system.

Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging: Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a technique in which the mean fluorescence lifetime of a chromophore is measured at each spatially resolvable element of a microscope image. The nanosecond excited-state lifetime is independent of probe concentration or light path length but dependent upon excited-state reactions such as fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET). These properties of fluorescence lifetimes allow exploration of the molecular environment of labelled macromolecules in the interior of cells. Imaging of fluorescence lifetimes enables biochemical reactions to be followed at each microscopically resolvable location within the cell. [P.I.H. Bastiaens, A. Squire, Trends in Cell Biology, 1999, 9(2), 48-52.] In our lab, we modified an Olympus Fluoview FV300 Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope with a PicoQuant system. In brief, a multimode fiber with angled FC/APC connector is used to couple the fluorescence emission from the Olympus FV300 scanning unit to a single photon avalanche diode (APD) detector, where an Instrument Response Function (IRF) around 50 ps can be reached. The data acquisition is done with a stand alone Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) module (TimeHarp 300, USB 2.0 interface), which provides high measurement rates up to 10 million counts/sec and provides a time resolution of 40 ps. A software package "SymPhoTime" is used to allow direct imaging the average fluorescence lifetime during the scanning process. Using SymPhoTime and other data/image analysis we perform both one- and two-photon Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM), Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) imaging, Fluorescence Lifetime Correlation Spectroscopy (FLCS) and Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS).

Linear and Nonlinear Spectroscopy: Using the fundemental wave (700-980 nm) and the second-harmonic (350-490 nm) of the Coherent Mira 900F femtosecond laser as excitation sources, an Ocean Optics SD2000 fiber optics spectrometer and the FLIM module from PicoQuant as detectors, linear and nonliear spectroscopic studies (both spectrum and lifetime) of solutions are also available in this lab.

Additional equipment available in the Department of Chemistry

CARY 500 and CARY 300 UV-visible spectrophotometers, Perkin Elmer Spectrum One FT-IR, Bruker FT-IR, Varian Unity 500 and 300 MHz multinuclear NMR spectrometers, and a Thermo-Finnigan GC-MS.