Facilities

 

Our facilities are located at:

424 Chemical and Biomedical Engineering Building

University Park

PA 16802

 

Igor Aronson has the following major experimental setups in Penn State University, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering Building. Fully equipped with modern incubators, fridges, centrifuges, measuring instruments, power supplies, computers, glassware, bench space, etc.

  • High-resolution video microscopy system. It includes two newest Olympus IX83 inverted microscopes, each equipped with Herzan active anti-vibration stage. Each setup is installed on the optical table, Thorlabs. The microscopes are equipped with 3 video cameras, Prosilica GT1660 (resolution 1660×1200, frame rate 62 fps), and GT4907 (4864×3232, 7.5 fps). Ultra-high sensitivity camera with a single photon resolution: Hamamatsu Flash 4. The system is fully automated and controlled by the computer. The system is used in experiments with synthetic swimmers and bacterial suspensions.
  • Olympus stereomicroscope ZS61. This microscope can be readily used for experiments with magnetic particles and bacterial suspensions.
  • High-precision low-pressure syringe pump CITONI neMESYS. The pump is currently used in experiments with synthetic swimmers.
  • 3D laser photolithography system Nanoscribe. State-of-the-art lithography system for 3D micro printing and maskless lithography. It enables the rapid fabrication of micro-sized parts by providing a simple 3D micro-printing workflow that converts virtual 3D models into physical parts with many applications in fields like optics, medicine, fluidics, or mechanics. Nanoscribe enables 3D printing of almost arbitrarily complex shaped polymer structures with the finest feature sizes in the sub-micrometer range that is achieved by means of two-photon polymerization. This instrument is currently used for 3D printing and prototyping microfluidic channels and ratchet-shaped objects. The lithography system is installed in PSU’s cleanroom nanofabrication facility.
  • Group computational resources. A GPU mini-cluster was recently purchased by Aronson’s group. It includes 4 of the most powerful graphical processing unit NVIDIA TITAN XP and TITAN V(Pascal GPU architecture, 12 GB memory 3840 computing cores per card). Aronson group has 3 latest ASL Marquis workstations for control of experiments and image processing.