Our laser lab is the primary lab of the group. All of the equipment in the lab was purchased and installed in the 2006/2007 academic year. The lab features a variety of state-of-the-art equipment assembled into a spectroscopic microscope that is centered around a broadly tunable Ti:Sapphire pulsed laser excitation source.

The featured equipment of the lab includes:

• A Coherent Chameleon Ultra II Ti:Sapphire laser: ~140fs pulses; tunable over the wavelength range of 680nm to 1080nm.
• An automated SHG unit that frequency-doubles the laser light to produce an excitation source tunable over the range of 340nm to 540nm.
• A liquid-He cold-finger cryostat that allows us to conduct measurements at temperatures below 4K and under high vacuum.
• A state-of-the art cooled CCD camera-and-spectrometer combination.
• A streak camera with 2 ps time resolution.
• Motorized translation stages for the cryostat which allow for precision movement and complete scanning automation.

Image: Excitation laser at (clockwise, starting in the upper left) 680nm, 540nm, 475nm, and 450nm.

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We have recently established a second lab where we study the electroluminescence of polymer systems. Studies in this lab focus on material systems applicable to polymer based devices such as organic LEDs (OLEDs) and organic solar cells.

The electroluminescence lab contains:

• A tunable nanosecond dye laser system.
• A gated intensified and electron multiplying CCD camera.
• A closed cycle helium cryostat system with internal electrical contacts.
• A nitrogen glovebox with evaporation system - coming soon.

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In addition to the laser lab, we also have a wet chemistry lab. This lab is primarily used for sample and substrate preparation, however, the lab is also capable of accommodating more sophisticated chemistry.

Image: Chemistry lab overview.

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Our laser and chemistry labs are augmented with access to the following shared resources of the University of Utah and the Department of Physics:

• The John Dixon Laser Institute.
• Spin-coating facilities.
• Metal evaporation and sputtering.
• A glove box for sample preparation in a Nitrogen environment.
• Combined atomic force microscope (AFM), near field optical microscope, & confocal Raman microscope.
• A scanning tunneling microscope (STM).