The Institute is located in self contained premises in the Wolfson Centre on the University of Strathclyde John Anderson campus in central Glasgow. In addition to the resources located within the Institute, we also have facilities and access to facilities as follows:

• Institute infrastructure for gallium nitride growth and processing is located off-campus at the Photonix facility (formerly Compound Semi-Conductors facility) on the West of Scotland Science Park
• The Institute has access to the facilities of the Centre for Biophotonics, in which we are a partner
• The Institute has access to a range of facilities in the Department of Physics, also located on the University's John Anderson campus
• As a partner in SUPA, we can arrange access to facilities in other SUPA institutions

Wolfson Centre

Within the Institute of Photonics in the Wolfson Centre, our facilities include:

• Twelve fully equipped laser laboratories
• Prep laboratory with fume cupboard, spin coater and clean area
• Wide range of laser sources (continuous, Q-switched and mode-locked)
• High resolution optical spectrometers (300-3000nm), from ultraviolet to infra-red
• Electronics and mechanical workshops, including 2½ axes acu-rite millpwr CNC milling machine
• Advanced IT support including optical modelling and multi-physics software (OptiCad for non-sequential ray tracing, Zeemax for lens design, Comsol multi-physics for thermal modelling etc and GLAD for diffractive propagtion of laser fields)
  

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Photonix Facility

The Institute has located major pieces of equipment, funded through an SFC SRDG and the Joint Research Equipment Initiative (JREI), at the Photonix facility on the West of Scotland Science Park including:

• Metal Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition (MOCVD) system for growth of gallium nitride (GaN) and related semiconductors
• Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching tools for processing of GaN and other semiconductor materials
  

The Institute's GaN materials research activities, based at Photonix, are the focal point of a University-wide research initiative which involves the Departments of Physics and Pure & Applied Chemistry as well as the Institute. At the Photonix facility, the Institute also has access to commercial-standard clean room facilities for the processing and fabrication of compound semiconductor devices. These facilities are dedicated to device development, prototyping and small scale production.

For more details about the facilities at Photonix, please click here - photonix.pdf (1.8Mb) requires Acrobat Reader to view click on logo to download Acrobat

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Centre for Biophotonics

The Institute is also a partner in the Centre for Biophotonics which has established significant infrastructure, funded through the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF), for multiphoton imaging. The Centre has the following confocal and multiphoton microscopes

• Microscopes
  BioRAD MRC 1024 MP, Nikon E600FN upright, with external detectors
  BioRAD MRC 1024 MP, Nikon TE300 inverted, external detectors and integral patch clamp recording
  BioRAD Radiance 2000 MP, Nikon E600FN upright, with external detectors
  Nikon E600 upright with Photometrics CoolSNAP CCD camera
• Lasers
  Blue laser diode (405nm)
  Krypton/Argon laser (488nm, 514nm, 568nm, 647nm)
  He-Ne (543nm, 632nm)
  Red laser diode (638nm)
  Ti:sapphire (720nm-925nm)
  Nd:YLF laser (1047nm)
  Custom-built sources, including white-light supercontinuum lasers and OPO's
• Image analysis
  Silicon Graphics O2 workstation networked to 12 processor Onyx 2, connected to virtual environment laboratory (Bitplane Imaris)
  Windows NT with Laserpix, Confocal assistant and Metamorph software Bio-Rad MRC 1024 confocal/multiphoton microscope with femtosecond Ti:sapphire and Nd:YLF lasers

Department of Physics

Within the Department of Physics, the Institute has access to the following facilities:

• The TOPS (Terahertz to Optical Pulse Source) Facility, where the femtosecond lasers available are used for nano and micro machining work.
• Semiconductor characterisation facilities of the Semiconductor Sepectroscopy Group