The ASU ultrafast laser spectroscopy and imaging facility, also known as the Ultrafast Laser Lab, is a multi-user facility housed in several laboratories in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Biodesign Institute. It was developed primarily under three NSF instrumentation grants and has been supervised by Neal Woodbury and managed by Su Lin since 1991. The facility has been expanded dramatically in recent years, including moving two thirds of the instrumentation into the newly-built Biodesign Institute, developing two new time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopic systems and upgrading two transient absorption spectrometers.

The facility is specialized in the development and application of time-resolved laser spectroscopy to biological, chemical and material research. It contains not only the most versatile systems for performing ultrafast transient absorbance and fluorescence measurements; it also includes microscopes capable of time resolved fluorescence measurements on the picosecond time scale. The combination of advanced laser technologies and instruments for spectroscopic and imaging measurements provides the capability of observing chemical reactions in real time with temporal resolution down to femtosecond time scales and spatial resolution and sensitivity to the point where single molecule signals are detectable. The femtosecond spectroscopy part of the facility consists of several solid-state-laser pumped femtosecond mode-locked Ti:Sapphire (Ti:S) lasers coupled with transient absorption and fluorescence spectrometers, providing users with a broad range of excitation and probe wavelength for kinetic measurements with femtosecond to picosecond time resolutions. The single molecule microscopy part of the facility consists of both pulsed and CW excitation lasers, confocal microscope bases and sensitive detection systems operating in single photon counting mode. The optics are designed such that the observation volume is extremely small, a few femtoliters or less. Detection of single molecules is achieved by either diffusion mode or surface mode.

The facility is completely accessible to the entire ASU research community. The facility instrumentation is versatile enough to meet the needs of chemists, biochemists, biologists, materials scientists and engineers. The user group has recently expanded from mainly the photochemistry and photobiology community to physics, engineering and material science campus wide. Students and postdoctoral researchers from many disciplinary backgrounds use this facility as part of their research projects. Besides photochemistry and photobiology researchers, investigators working on semiconductors, nanocrystalline materials, and materials processing have begun to realize the utility of transient optical analysis.

The management team consists of full-time scientists with backgrounds in the areas of time-resolved laser spectroscopy and imaging. Contact us for any technical issues related to laser spectroscopy and imaging or if you would like to utilize the laser facility in your research.