Techniques and Equipment
Major Research Techniques
Spectroscopy
- Multi-Colour and White Light Pump-probe transient absorption (femtoseconds to seconds)
- Multi-Colour Spectrally Resolved Three-Pulse Photon Echo Peak Shift
- Femtosecond Kerr-gated fluorescence
- Femtosecond fluorescence upconversion
- Stimulated emission decay measurements
- Picosecond fluorescence measurements by Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC)
Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Anisotropy (Bulk)
Equipment
Femtosecond (Coherent Amplified System)
- A mode-locked titanium sapphire laser (Mira-Seed: 20 fs, 76 MHz, 0.5 W) pumped by a Verdi G20 (20W, 532nm)
- Biophotonics Solutions MIIPS 640P pulse shaper
- A chirped-pulse regenerative-amplifier (RegA9050: <50 fs, 10-250 kHz, 0.1-2.5 W)
- Two optical parametric amplifiers (OPA9050: ~50 fs, [>nJ] 400 nm, [~0.15 nJ] 480-700 nm, [~20 pJ] 900-2300 nm)
Femtosecond (High-Repetition)
- A cavity-dumped mode-locked titanium sapphire laser (Mira 900/PulseSwitch: ~120 fs, 76 MHz and 54 MHz to 200 Hz, 710-900 nm, ~40 nJ)
- Doubler and Tripler (240-300 nm, 350-450 nm)
- Optical Parametric Oscillator (APE: intracavity doubled)
Femtosecond (High-Repetition)
- KML Ti:sapp. oscillator (15 fs @ 80 MHz)
Picosecond
- Fianium SC450-PP-HE super-continuum laser
- NKT super-continuum laser/Varia
- Time-Bandwidth Products Cheetah X, frequency doubled picosecond Nd:Vanadate laser
- Two cavity-dumped dye lasers (Spectra Physics)
Nanosecond
- Q-Switched Nd:YAG/Optical parametric oscillator (Ekspla NT342B-10-SH/SFG extension, >30mJ@450nm; 410-2600nm, >6 mJ@340nm; 225-409nm)
- NKT SuperK COMPACT supercontinuum laser (tunable ~450-750nm, variable (kHz-MHz) repetition rate, ~100ps pulses)
Microscopes
- Laser Scanning Confocal (Olympus IX71/FV300)
- TIRF (Nikon TE2000)
- Structured Illumination Microscopy
- Scanning near field optical microscopy (SNOM) (Nanonics)
- STED microscopy
- Single Molecule
- EMCCD (Roper)
- sCMOS (Andor)
Time-resolved microscopy techniques
- TCSPC (Becker and Hickl SPC830 & SPC150, EI TCC900 cards)
- Gated photon counting (Nikon LIMO)
- High repetition rate intensified CCD camera (La Vision PicoStarHR)