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Wright-Rieman Chemistry Laboratories
The Department of Chemistry is located in the Wright-Rieman Chemistry Laboratories on the Busch Campus. This modern, fully-equipped complex of buildings contains the departmental offices and stockrooms, faculty and staff offices, classroom and seminar rooms, a 200-seat auditorium, and advanced undergraduate teaching labs, as well as chemistry research laboratories and facilities. The research facilities include extensive shop facilities, a comprehensive chemistry library, outstanding computer facilities, and state-of-the-art research instrumentation. Support for these facilities is provided by a high-level support staff, including Ph.D. chemists in the positions of Director of NMR Spectroscopy, Director of Computational Chemistry, and Director of X-Ray Facilities.Research Instrumentation
Major research instruments of particular note are listed. Most of this equipment is located in Wright-Rieman Laboratories, although some instruments belonging to chemistry faculty with joint appointments are located in the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, and the Serin Physics Laboratory.Lasers and spectrophotometers
Supersonic jet and molecular beam apparatuses; nanosecond laser flash photolysis system; diode-array stop-flow spectrophotometer; temperature-programmable ORD-CD spectropolarimeters; temperature-controlled fluorescence spectrophotometer; low-temperature FTIR spectrophotometers; high resolution UV/Visible and Raman spectrophotometers; YAG, excimer, and tunable dye lasers. Magnetic resonance instrumentation includes 400, 500, and 600 MHz multinuclear NMRs with 2-D and 3-D capabilities; 200 MHz multinuclear NMR with solid-state capabilities; ESR spectrometers.Surface analysis equipment
Ultrahigh vacuum surface analysis systems with facilities for Auger, photoelectron (XPS & UPS), and electron energy loss (HREELS) spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, low energy electron diffraction (LEED), electron stimulated desorption ion angular distribution (ESDIAD) measurements, low energy ion scattering, and He atom scattering; scanning tunneling microscopes; atomic force microscopes.Thermochemical instrumentation
Stopped-flow isothermal mixing calorimeter; hypersensitive isothermal titration calorimeter; pressure-variable differential scanning calorimeter; batch, titration, and differential scanning calorimeters.Other major equipment
SQUID magnetometer; GC/quadrupole mass spectrometer; inductively coupled plasma (ICP) mass spectrometer; automated DNA and peptide synthesizers; high-performance liquid chromatographs.Computer Facilities
The computer and molecular graphics facilities used by the students and faculty of the Chemistry program provide the necessary resources for the several computationally intensive research programs. The Chemistry Department's computer facilities consist of a diverse mix of hardware including 21 assorted Silicon Graphics workstations, 7 Hewlett Packard workstations, several SUN workstations. More than 150 X-terminals, Macintoshes and PCs on 4 local area networks (LANS) with associated network hardware to facilitate network connectivity for the entire Chemistry building providing access to these workstations as well as the rest of the internet. Departmental molecular graphics facilities include a variety of Silicon Graphics workstations and Macintosh computers, a color dye sublimation printer, color laser printers, and pen plotters. University computing facilities include a cluster of SUN computers. Faculty and Students in the Chemistry Department participate in the Rutgers High Performance Computing Project which provides local support for the use of massively parallel computers at National Supercomputer Centers.Departmental Shops
The Department of Chemistry has fully equipped in-house glassblowing and electronics shops, and the combined Chemistry-Physics Machine Shop is located in the adjacent Serin Physics Laboratory. For those who wish to do some of their own instrument fabrication, a self-service machine shop is available.X-ray Diffraction Facilities
In the departmental x-ray lab, we have the following instrumentation:- Smart APEX CCD single-crystal diffraction system (Bruker-AXS), with Mo or Cu target available. Data collection times are 2-16 hr.
- Two CAD4 diffractometers using sealed x-ray tube, Mo or Cu target, with low or high temperatures available from a liquid nitrogen boil-off system (-150 to +150C).
- HiStar multiwire area detector (Bruker-AXS) on a 3-kW FR571 rotating anode x-ray generator (Nonius) with graphite monochromatized fine focus Cu radiation, and a low-temperature environment from an FTS refrigerated air system (-25 to +25C) or an Oxford Cryosystems liquid nitrogen system (-170 to +25C). Polycrystalline, protein or other polymer samples are analyzed. A Weissenberg, back-reflection Laue or precession camera is also available on this generator, although these are used primarily for teaching purposes.
- An instructional (macromolecular) crystallization lab and complete computational facilities are incorporated into the x-ray lab.
Results include:
- details of molecular structure (conformation, bond distances & angles) with high precision (e.g., 0.005 for pure hydrocarbons, or 0.0005 for metal coordination geometry of organometallic compounds);
- for resolved chiral compounds, x-ray structure determination is the one unequivocal technique for determining absolute conformation;
- compositional impurities can be quantified to within 1% (non-H atoms);
- details of intermolecular contacts, including hydrogen bonding, salt bridges and host-guest interaction;
- the crystal structure itself provides a minimum free-energy structure that is a useful starting point for molecular modeling studies;
- analysis of thin film or polycrystalline samples is also possible (degree of crystallinity, texture analysis or phase identification).
In the solid State Chemistry Laboratory, x-ray diffraction data of polycrystalline (powder) samples are collected with a new Bruker-AXS D8 Advance powder diffractometer or a Scintag PAD5 diffractometer, the latter equipped with a variable temperature sample stage, 10 to 1250 K and a scintillation detector. Access to the JCPDS database aids in qualitative analysis (e.g., phase determination), while Rietveld refinement is used for quantitative analyses of known phases.