With this award co-funded by the Division of Chemistry and the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program, Professor Bern Kohler and colleague Robert A. Walker from Montana State University will acquire an optical emission lifetime spectrometer. The award will enhance research training and education at all levels, especially in fundamental photophysics, solar energy conversion, and materials characterization. The acquisition will be especially directed at studies of DNA emission dynamics, solute isomerization and aggregation at solid/liquid interfaces, structure and degradation in mixed ion-electron conducting materials, luminescence probes of metal binding sites in viruses and bioinspired nanomaterials, energy and electron transfer in coordination polymers, fluorescence decay in proteins and 2D gels, and studies of novel chromophores for nonlinear-optical applications.
Emission of light (photons) by excited atoms, molecules, and materials is one of the most fundamental and versatile tools in experimental science. The intensity and rate at which the light is emitted after prior irradiation by a laser provides insight on how the molecular structure of a material is structured and how it releases the stored energy. This information can be used in numerous applications ranging from solar energy conversion to laser medical applications. Undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from the instrument's versatility and ease of use as they are trained in its use in their research. Furthermore, the spectrometer will provide educational opportunities to groups underrepresented in science. American Indian high school students from Montana's reservations will use the emission lifetime spectrometer every summer as part of a six-week introduction to research, and further outreach is planned at Montana's seven tribal colleges.
Support from this award was used to acquire and assemble an Emission Lifetime Spectrometer (ELS) capable of measuring fluorescence lifetimes that range from a fraction of a billionth of a second (5 x 10-11 sec) to milliseconds (10-3 sec). The ELS has become a cornerstone of an advanced optical instrumentation infrastructure being developed at Montana State University. Given its versatility and ease of use, the ELS has served as an integral part of research projects being pursued by visiting scientists from other institutions, graduate and undergraduate students, post-doctoral research associates, and even Native American high school students supported by Montana State University summer research fellowships. The ELS has also served as a fruitful teaching platform for graduate and undergraduate students by providing hands-on opportunities to build state of the art optical instrumentation, develop software programs that enable different pieces of the equipment to communicate with each other and explore differences between accuracy and precision in measurements. In other words, the construction of the ELS has provided students with hands-on training that will serve them well when they take the next step and pursue a career in science or engineering. This outcome is particularly important when one recognizes that the Bozeman area is home to an unusually high density of high-tech optics companies and there is a vigorous campus umbrella group for optics-focused research groups and companies (OpTeC, www.optec.montana.edu ). The ELS has also served as a regional resource with researchers coming to MSU from other institutions including Montana State University-Billings and Brigham Young University-Idaho to perform measurements. In this respect, the ELS is well on its way to fulfilling its purpose of becoming an indispensible resource to scientists and engineers not just at Montana State University but in a large region of the rural, intermountain west. In terms of scholarship, the ELS has been used by researchers to study a wide variety of systems of interest in the environmental, biological, and energy sciences. Projects have investigated topics as diverse as corrosion and film formation on mineralogically relevant surfaces to bioaccumulation of pollutants in membranes to charge transfer in dye-sensitized molecules intended for use in next generation solar energy devices. Results from these studies have been reported at meetings in both national and international settings and also in the scientific literature. As the ELS becomes an increasingly important part of MSU’s research infrastructure, its impact will only continue to grow.
