The LC MRC operates a wide variety of computational and experimental facilities, which are essential for its research, and which are available to academic and industrial researchers on a limited basis. Additionally, these facilities are made available at minimal cost for scheduled courses and for independent study/individual instruction. For general information, please contact Matt Glaser.

These facilities are as follows (all facilities are on the CU Boulder campus unless otherwise indicated):

• X-ray Diffraction Facility (Faculty Director, Noel Clark; Manager, Chenhui Zhu) — Center researchers maintain an active program of experimentation at synchrotron x-ray sources, and this program is currently being enhanced by the addition of a local high-intensity diffractometer for preliminary and routine work. The system, currently being installed, consists of three main elements: (i) a two-port 18 kW rotating anode x-ray generator; (ii) a Huber 4-circle diffractometer and scintillation detector for performing q - 2q or h-k-l scanned diffraction; (iii) a SAXS camera for small angle scattering experiments.

• Computation Facility (Faculty Director, Matt Glaser; System Administrator, Robert Blackwell) — Six SGI Indigo II workstations (3 R10000, 2 R8000, 1 R4400), thirteen Compaq XP1000 workstations (9 500 MHz, 4 667 MHz), two Macintosh Power PCs, three Pentium PCs, two DLT tape drives, and three printers, networked via fast ethernet (100 Mb/sec), with a fiber-optic uplink to the CU internet backbone. These systems provide the requisite computational capacity and peripheral environment for molecular simulations, quantum chemical calculations, and subsequent analysis and visualization. The Compaq machines, in particular, deliver sustained peak floating-point performance in excess of 10 Gflops. Software on the Unix (SGI and Compaq) workstations includes quantum chemistry programs (Gaussian 98 and GaussView), Mathematica, IDL, and our own molecular simulation and visualization software packages. Volkmar Vill's LiqCryst liquid crystal database is installed on the PCs.

• Optical Microscopy Laboratory (Faculty Director, Joe Maclennan; Manager, Renfan Shao) — Seven polarized light microscopes; three visible light spectrometers; electronics for measuring FLC polarization and EO response time; instrumentation for generating fast, high-voltage pulses; total internal reflection (TIR) ellipsometer integrated with a polarized light microscope for simultaneous characterization of surface and bulk optical properties; video imaging and editing equipment, including analog and digital component video color CCD cameras and a PC-based digital video editing station. This is the principal physical characterization facility for the Center's new LC materials, and is used by researchers in the region needing equipment and assistance in carrying out polarized light optical microscopy. Digital video capture and analysis is a key part of the interpretation of textures in terms of molecular orientation and the characterization of domain growth dynamics. We intend to purchase a variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometer to investigate the structure of tilted-phase freely suspended liquid crystal films, and of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) formed on solid substrates as alignment layers for liquid crystal cells.
  

• Spectroscopy Facilities (Faculty Director, Noel Clark) - Bruker IFS 66 FTIR spectrometer, which can capture polarized time-resolved spectra in the IR and visible with a temporal resolution of 15 ns; IR microscope attachment; two UV-VIS Spectrometers.

• Probe Microscopy Laboratory (Faculty Director, Noel Clark) - One Nanoscope II STM, one Nanoscope III AFM/STM.

• NLO Evaluation System (Faculty Director, Noel Clark) — Optical bench for nonlinear optical measurements using a Nd:YAG³⁺ laser, and a He-Ne Laser for interferometry.

• Clean Room (Faculty Director, Noel Clark; Manager, Art Klittnick) — A 12' x 15' clean room is available for cell fabrication and sample preparation.

• Light Scattering Laboratory (Faculty Director, Noel Clark) — Argon-ion laser, correlator, optical benches and optical components. Planned acquisitions include a high-speed, multiple delay time correlator for photon correlation spectroscopy.

• Chemistry Laboratories (Faculty Director, Dave Walba) — Fully equipped state-of-the-art organic synthesis space for eight researchers is available for use by Center members. Home base for the Walba synthesis group, these wet benches are also employed for cell filling and handling of LC materials by other Center researchers when hooded space is required, and have been leased on a short-term basis to industrial collaborators in need of liquid crystal synthetic capacity. The CU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry also maintains state-of-the-art analytical laboratories including an NMR laboratory with 300 MHz, 400 MHz, and 500 MHz instruments, a mass spectrometry laboratory with electrospray LC and GC/mass spec capabilities, and a small-molecule X-ray crystallography facility. A preparative-scale chromatography lab and inert atmosphere (glove box) synthesis set-up maintained by the Organic Division of the department are also available for use by members of the Center.

• CSM Surface Optical Spectroscopy Laboratory (Faculty Director, Tom Furtak) — High-resolution sum-frequency generation spectrometer and second-harmonic generation facility (Quanta-Ray DCR YAG, PDL dye, andRaman IR lasers); variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometer (Woollam WVASE advanced system); two multi-channel, high-resolution Raman scattering systems with micro-Raman capabilities (Spex 1877 and Spex 1403); multi-mode Nanoscope III AFM.

• UU Computation Facility (Faculty Director, Grant Smith; System Administrator, Li Cai) — Nine Digital Unix workstations (8 433 MHz and 1 500 MHz) and one 500 MHz Compaq XP1000 workstation; 15 Linux workstations (600 MHz Intel PIII); 37-node Beowulf cluster running RedHat Linux (20 600 MHz Intel PIII nodes and 27 1 GHz AMD Athlon nodes), capable of running parallel jobs using MPI and the pgf77 parallel compiler. Peripherals include three laser printers, a DEC tape drive, and four Linux RAID systems for data backup and storage.