The Laser Lab in Byrne Hall Lab 115 houses a <20 fs Titanium:Sapphire laser oscillator.  It is being constructed from the last kit ever sold by KMLabs, and is pumped by a Coherent Verdi 5 Watt cw laser, and produces a few hundred mW at 100 MHz with an ~800 nm center wavelength.  Several ultrafast diagnostics are being built.

We are constructing a pump-probe setup where we will use lock-in detection, optical choppers, time-resolved detectors, rapid delay scanning and other signal recovery techniques to conduct optical pump-probe measurements on various systems.  We have recently acquired a photonic fiber continuum generator, which should extend our probe wavelengths throughout the visible spectrum.

We are in the process of rebuilding a Spectra Physics Quanta-Ray GCR-130 Nd:YAG q-switched laser to produce nearly 500 mJ/pulse @10 Hz (1064 nm).  This will be used for temperature-jump experiments, among other things.

We conduct a large protion of our research at Sector 7 of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a unique ultrafast laser / synchrotron x-ray facility which is 30 miles away at Argonne National Laboratory.  They specialize in high intensity / microfocus spectroscopy experiments and also high resolution time-resolved x-ray diffraction.  We are also building a temperature-jump Small Angle X-ray Scattering experiment at Sector 18 (Bio-CAT) of the APS.

Our laboratory and lasers are built, maintained, and operated exclusively by undergraduate and beginning level graduate students in the DePaul University Physics Department!  Our students are all Users of the APS as well.