Jimenez Lab

Jimenez Lab Facilities and Equipment and JILA Resources

Optical Laboratory

• Digital temperature control system (±1°F stability)
• Two vibration-isolation tables for optical systems: 4’ by 14’ and 5’ by 12’
• Acousto-optically cavity-dumped, mode-locked Ti:sapphire oscillator, producing sub-30 fs pulses at 750-900 nm wavelength, repetition rate tunable from single shot to 10 MHz, pumped by a 5 W diode-pumped Nd:YVO4 laser
• Mode-locked Ti:sapphire oscillator pumped by 5 W diode-pumped laser
• High repetition-rate Ti:sapphire femtosecond amplifier system and optical parametric amplifier
• Actively stabilized, two-dimensional femtosecond Fourier- transform electronic spectrometer (under construction)
• Liquid nitrogen cooled, open-electrode CCD camera/300 mm spectrograph system
• Four-wave mixing spectrometer with 2 computer controlled time-delays and LabView-based data collection system based on:
  • Two-axis (4” and 12” travel) DC-motor micropositioning system, with linear encoders and 100 nm bidirectional repeatability
  • 2 digital lock-in amplifiers and phase-locked chopper
  • Home-built temperature controlled spinning optical transmission cell, with temperature control -20 to +85°C, adjustable from 1-4000 RPM, permitting measurements on 20 microliter protein samples
  • Thermo-electrically cooled large-area avalanche photodiodes for detection of four-wave mixing signals
• Fluorescence upconversion system (under construction)
• UV-vis absorption and fluorescence setups for measurements in microfluidics, with motion control system for automated device positioning

Biochemistry Laboratory

Equipment and supplies for molecular biology, bacterial culture growth, protein expression, and purification, including:

• Molecular biology-grade water system
• Mettler electronic analytical and top-loading balances
• Chromatography refrigerator and -30°C freezer
• Temperature-controlled incubating shaker
• J-20 refrigerated high speed centrifuge
• Setup for protein and DNA gel electrophoresis and electronic documentation
• FPLC and low pressure chromatography apparatus
• Diode-array UV-vis spectrophotometer with a custom-built, 2-position temperature-controlled cell holder (controllable from -20 to +85°C)

Computational Resources

• Two Linux workstations including a quad, dual-core AMD opteron system with 32 GB RAM, 1.4TB RAID5 disk array. Software for protein structure visualization (VMD), molecular dynamics simulations (NAMD, CHARMM), automated protein-ligand docking (AUTODOCK) and quantum chemistry (GAMESS)

Departmental Facilities

• Double-monochromator fluorometer system with temperature-controlled cell holder
• W.M. Keck Optical Measurements Laboratory including cleanroom, nanofabrication facilities, scanning electron microscope, and spectroscopic instruments (FTIR, extended-range UV-vis-NIR spectrophotometer)