The research group called the Nucleus of Spectroscopy and Molecular Structure (NEEM, from the Portuguese acronym Núcleo de Espectroscopia e EStrutura Molecular) was created in 2000, as a need to have researchers from the Department of Chemistry linked to a group registered with the CNPq.
At the time, only two researchers were part of the group, professor Luiz Fernando Cappa de Oliveira and professor Hélio Ferreira dos Santos. Over the years, countless researchers from the Department and beyond joined the group, some called, others left to create your own group.
Today, the group is composed by researchers and their students which are experts on different areas of natural sciences, including Chemistry, Physics and Biology, in addition to a wide range of instruments available to all users who want to use an existing infrastructure.
In the vibrational spectroscopy techniques, the group has two Raman instruments, one dispersive and other interferometric, with a large number of laser lines excitation, including the 1064 nmof the interferometric instrument, which is a very good equipment for organics and natural products systems. There is also ainfrared microscope instrument, which allows the group to obtain infrared images to be compared with the Raman ones, from a large number of investigated systems.
Always coordinated by Professor Luiz Fernando Cappa de Oliveira, in addition to the instrumentation directly connected to vibrational spectroscopy, NEEM today, on completing 20 years of existence, also incorporates collaborations involving the research infrastructure in elucidating crystalline structures, through x-ray equipment (one crystallographic and the other measuring polycrystalline systems), as well as two scanning electron microscopes (one conventional and one tabletop, which allows obtaining high-quality images of the most different materials, as well as their elementary chemical composition via dispersion energy analysis, in addition to a transmission microscope, which allows administrators to obtain very high quality images.