Instrumentation

Located in Hutchison Hall, the chemistry department's modern instrumentation facility provides a stimulating work environment and is equipped with a wide variety of sophisticated research instrumentation for spectroscopy, analysis, and computation.

Many of the department's instruments are highly specialized. Some have been designed and built on site or substantially modified from commercially available instruments to meet the specific needs of the department's researchers.

The departmental instruments are used by students and faculty in a hands-on way, and most are available 24 hours a day. The opportunity for students to use state-of-the-art instrumentation represents one of the unique strengths of our department. We have acquired the most up-to-date equipment through a series of instrumentation grants from the , the , and other grants/donors.

Many of our research instruments, such as the NMR’s, Mass Spectrometers, X-Ray Diffractometer facility and the Laser Raman facility, are available for use by researchers outside the department.

For more information about NMR and MS instrumentation, contact Terry O’Connell (terry.oconnell[at]rochester.edu) or Tessa Baker (tbaker10[at]ur.rochester.edu)

For more information about the Laser Raman facility see the link below.

For more information about the X-Ray Diffractometer and Elemental Analysis Facilities, see the links below.

Staff members are available to train new users, help with troubleshooting, and offer advice on special problems, but the actual measurements are carried out by the individual researchers and the students they mentor.

Current Equipment

(Updated January 24, 2024)

NMR Spectrometers:

  • Brüker 500 MHz spectrometer
  • Brüker 400 MHz spectrometer
  • JEOL 500 MHz spectrometer with liquid N2 cryoprobe
  • JEOL 400 MHz spectrometer

Mass Spectrometers:

  • Shimadzu Performance MALDI/MS
  • Shimadzu LCMS-2050
  • Shimadzu LCMS-2020 with Nexera UHPLC
  • Thermo LTQ Velos Ion Trap LC/MS
  • Advion MS with Plate Express, ASAP, and Direct Injection
  • Shimadzu GC/MS, with dual columns, +&- CI
  • Shimadzu GC/MS, with direct injection probe, +&- CI

Computer clusters for theoretical chemistry (Note that these facilities complement those at ):

  • Action Cluster: 16 nodes of PowerEdge FC430, each with 24 cores (Intel E5-2680v3, 2.5 GHz) and 62 GB memory
  • Chem Cluster: 30 nodes each with 12 cores 30-40 GB memory
  • Femto Cluster: 30 nodes each with 16 cores and 63 GB memory
  • Ferric Cluster: 2 nodes each with 12 cores and 63 GB memory

Other shared instruments:

  • Mettler Toledo REACT IR 701L: infrared spectrometer with silicon probe for in-situ reaction monitoring
  • Perkin Elmer Spectrum 3 FTIR
  • Cary 6000i UV-Vis-NIR Spectrophotometer
  • Shimadzu AA-7000 atomic absorption spectrophotometer
  • Brüker EMXplus EPR spectrometer with low-temperature capability to 4 kelvin.

Various additional equipment is utilized in individual research groups. See the equipment list PDF for a complete listing.