As part of a £26 million investment in Chemistry, our research is supported by our new, custom-designed laboratories and an extensive array of instrumentation and equipment.

Our facilities contain dedicated synthetic, physical, analytical and biological research laboratories, as well as computer-based labs for our Chemical Theory and Computation researchers. Labs are equipped with state-of-the-art spectroscopic and analytical instrumentation, as well as gloveboxes, fume hoods, and a variety of computational equipment. Instruments are supported and maintained by our four experimental officers, who you should contact if you wish to use the equipment. Our instrumentation as a whole is worth approximately £7 million, and if you choose to study a PhD with us, you will have access to much of it for your own research.

We also have a number of custom-designed instrument rooms to support our research. A particular highlight of our extensive array of instruments is our £1.2 million 700 MHz wide-bore solid state NMR spectrometer. We also possess two solution state NMR instruments; one of these is used primarily for research, the other for teaching. These are used by our Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy research group to characterise and measure the properties of atoms, molecules, solids, materials and biological systems.

Our cutting-edge facilities also include the Nanoscribe Photonic Professional GT - the fastest microscale 3D printer available, with an achievable feature size of 1 µm and smaller; our Keysight 5500 atomic force microscope and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope, with a magnification range of 25× to 1,000,000 and imaging in air, fluids, and under controlled environmental and temperature conditions; our gloveboxes, used for the handling and synthesising of air-and-moisture reactive compounds and several £100,000’s worth of separations equipment allows the identification and quantification of trace compounds.

Our computational facilities include Lancaster’s High-End Computing Cluster for computational research that requires high performance and high throughput computing. The combined facility offers over 5,000 CPU cores, 23 TB aggregate of memory, 70 TB of high-performance filestore, and 1.5 PB of medium performance filestore. We also have access to local Linux-based machines and GPU clusters, as well as a 384 core, 3 TB RAM, Linux based computer cluster. At the regional level, we make use of the N8 Polaris and NSCCS Slater HPC facilities, and at the national level, we use the ARCHER HPC facility. Our new building redevelopment programme will provide us with custom-designed space and equipment to support our research needs. In addition, we have a multitude of computational codes available.

Our own facilities are available for use by members of other departments, as well as other universities and commercial users. For specific enquiries, please contact the relevant experimental officers, but if you are unsure of your needs, contact Helen Quirk instead.