Existing Facilities and Equipment

There is significant infrastructure available at the primary institutions involved in this research.  At UB there are facilities available in the ILPB, the Center for Advanced Photonic and Electronic Materials (CAPEM), the Materials Research Instrument Facility (MRIF) and the Center for Computational Research (CCR).  The major facilities for this proposed program are: 

Theoretical/Computational

UB’s Center for Computational Research (CCR, www.ccr.buffalo.edu): supports high-end research computing and visualization.  The Center’s extensive computing facilities include a 128 processor SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer, a 42 processor IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer, and a Linux/Beowulf cluster of 64 Sun Ultra5 workstations. The computer visualization laboratory features a Pyramid Systems ImmersaDesk, an SGI Onyx2 Infinite Reality2 graphics supercomputer, and several graphics workstations. 

Synthesis and Fabrication:

Thin film preparation: Class 100 clean room to prepare high optical quality materials, Langmuir-Blodgett apparatus, electrochemical polymerization set up, thin film vacuum deposition and thickness monitor, D.C. sputtering and glow discharge, spin coating and doctor blading assembly, optical microscopy, glow discharge, profilometer.

Facilities for synthesis: Class 100 clean room facility, Cell culture hoods, microscopes, Sol-gel processing, ovens for drying, Hoods, pumps, rotary evaporators drybox, DSC, TGA.

BioMedical Facilities

Cell Biology & Protein Chemistry Laboratory; Synthetic Chemistry Laboratory (chromphore and ligand coupling); Molecular Biology/DNA Laboratory; Animal Facilities; Biological Level 3 Containment Facility; Laminar Flow Biological level 2 Containment Hood; Cell culture incubators; ELISA reader; DNA Synthesizer and Sequencer and support equipment; Low Pressure Liquid Chromotography system for protein/peptide isolation and support equipment; Coutler Cell Counter; Confocal Microscope with one- and  two-photon excitation capacity with microspectroscopy capacity; Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) ; Ultrafast lasers for tissue engineering; NearField Optical Microscope; BioScope Atomic Force Microscope.

Electrical, Structural and Optical Characterization

Resources for Structural Interface Studies: TEM (lattice imaging); multiple AFM/MFM/STM systems; planned low-T AFM/MFM/NSOM; one- and two-photon confocal microscopy (Raman scattering); XAFS; X-ray reflectometry; interfacial characterization, band offset determination and transport; multiple X-ray diffractometers; and field emission SEM.

Facilities for Ultrafast spectroscopy: femtosecond and picosecond pump-probe spectroscopy facilities covering the range from the FIR (Terahertz) to the UV, at temperatures between 2K and room temperature; direct picosecond time-resolved spectroscopy (streak camera) facility.

Facilities for Optical and Electro-optical Studies and Characterization: multiple spectroscopic systems capable of PL, PL-excitation, reflectivity, transmission, Raman scattering, optically detected resonance spectroscopy, in the spectral region from the far IR (Terahertz) to the UV. 

MRIF Facilities:  Thin Film X-ray diffractometer (rotating anode system); extensive instrumentation for Surface and Thin film Analysis including ToF SIMS, Photoemission, and Auger spectroscopies; Squid Magnetometer; liquid helium production and liquid nitrogen distribution facilities.