This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation Program will help the Department of Chemistry at Trinity University acquire a luminescence spectrometer to support the research and education programs in chemistry at this undergraduate institution. Among the areas of chemical research that will be enhanced by this acquisition are 1) photophysical properties of tetrapyrroles and bilirubin analogs, and 2) sterically hindered substituted polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons derived from fluoranthene. The luminescence spectrometer will be a significant addition to the department's instrumentation capabilities, greatly enhancing current and future research efforts dealing with emission from electronically excited states. Luminescence is light emission which occurs during the decay of an excited state of a molecule, and is called fluorescence if it occurs immediately or phosphorescence if it occurs a long time after the formation of the excited state. Luminescence spectroscopy is a very sensitive tool for measuring very low concentrations of biomolecules and in studying kinetics and mechanisms of photochemical reactions.
