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Facilities

Research Facilities

The primary research labs are located at the Ellison Institute of Technology and include both optical device test and measurement facilities as well as optical material synthesis and characterization labs.  Additionally, we maintain optical and electron imaging capabilities.

The Armani lab maintains an organic synthesis lab with 5 ducted fumehoods (with building nitrogen, DI, air, and vacuum), 3 retractable snorkels, and an Ar glovebox. In addition, the facility has:

  • Oxygen plasma system
  • General bioconjugation equipment (tilt tray, hot plates, refrigerated centrifuge, etc)
  • General polymer and small molecule synthesis equipment (Schlenk lines, rotovaps, etc)
  • Vapor deposition and growth equipment
  • Various tube furnaces ducted into exhaust lines/ovens
  • Beckman UV-Vis spectrophotometer
  • Horiba Floromax4 fluorometer with integrating sphere
  • Gaertner Waferskan Multi-wavelength variable angle ellipsometer
  • Nikon upright widefield microscope with polarization
  • Nikon upright fluorescence microscope
  • Zeiss upright materials analysis microscope with polarization and T stage
  • Zeiss inverted fluorescence microscope with integrated Andor inline spectroscope
  • Hitachi desktop SEM
  • Various fridges/freezers

The Armani Lab maintains a comprehensive suite of test & measurement capabilities for individual device analysis, including:

  • Waveguide testing set-up
  • Three resonant cavity testing set-ups
  • Tapered waveguide fabrication set-up
  • Assorted tunable lasers from visible through near-IR
  • Assorted fixed wavelength diode lasers from visible through near-IR
  • Andor spectrograph
  • OSAs and ESA
  • EDFA and associated filtering system
  • SRS lock-in amplifier
  • optical trap
  • CO2 laser reflow system
  • Microfluidics control stations
  • COMSOL FEM and Lumerical FDTD Workstations

The Armani Lab maintains a BSL2+ cell culture lab in MCB. It has:

  • two Thermo Fisher incubators
  • two Biosafety cabinets
  • water baths (large and small)
  • centrifuges and shakers (benchtop and mini-)
  • plate reader
  • inverted (DIC) widefield microscope
  • Various fridges/freezers (-22 and -86)
  • longterm cell storage (liquid nitrogen tanks)
  • hemocytometer
  • UV-Vis spectrometer

In addition, the building has an central user (shared-use) autoclave, ice-maker, cold room, and glassware washer.

 

In addition, we routinely use core user facilities located on the USC campus. These include:

University of Southern California