Future Research Interests

Calorimetry is a discipline demanding exquisite experimental care, and is an art as well as a science compared to many other areas of the chemical sciences, there are comparatively few new apprentices of this study. To aid future researchers interested in performing new experiments on the energetics of organomagnesium compounds, as well as historians of our science, we describe in considerable detail the earlier experiments performed by one of the authors (T.H.) but not included in the original publication. 

Recent work by Dickinson on fracto-emission(36) indicates that ions, neutral particles, electrons and photons could be detected during the polymer fracture processes. The identification of these species during polymer wear may be of future research interests. 

The viscosity shows a shght dependence on the fibre length at low shear rates, which is disappearing at higher shear rates. A more detailed investigation of these effects as well as the influence of fibre content will be subjects of oin future research interest. 

Although coherent control is now a mature field, much remains to be accomplished in the study of the channel phase. There is no doubt that coherence plays an important role in large polyatomic molecules as well as in dissipative systems. To date, however, most of the published research on the channel phase has focused on isolated atoms and diatomic molecules, with very few studies addressing the problems of polyatomic and solvated molecules. The work to date on polyatomic molecules has been entirely experimental, whereas the research on solvated molecules has been entirely theoretical. It is important to extend the experimental methods from the gas to the condensed phase and hence explore the theoretical predictions of Section VC. Likewise interesting would be theoretical and numerical investigations of isolated large polyatomics. A challenge to future research would be to make quantitative comparison of experimental and numerical results for the channel phase. This would require that we address a sufficiently simple system, where both the experiment and the numerical calculation could be carried out accurately. 

Although the main topic of this review is the photophysics of single bases, a brief summary of some recent theoretical investigations for systems beyond the monomers is given here. Progress in this area is limited compared to what has been done computationally for the monomers but there is a great interest in this topic and intense future research is expected to follow. 

One of the interests in confined polymers arises from adsorption behavior— that is, the intake or partitioning of polymers into porous media. Simulation of confined polymers in equilibrium with a bulk fluid requires simulations where the chemical potentials of the bulk and confined polymers are equal. This is a difficult task because simulations of polymers at constant chemical potential require the insertion of molecules into the fluid, which has poor statistics for long chains. Several methods for simulating polymers at constant chemical potential have been proposed. These include biased insertion methods [61,62], novel simulation ensembles [63,64], and simulations where the pore is physically connected to a large bulk reservoir [42]. Although these methods are promising, so far they have not been implemented in an extensive study of the partitioning of polymers into porous media. This is a fruitful avenue for future research. 

Although there are several ethical concerns with biobanks and other large-scale research repositories (Rothstein, 2002), the most important issue is informed consent. Participants in research involving human subjects must be advised of the intended research to be performed with their specimens. With biobanks, however, the future research uses of the samples are unknown at the time of collection. It would be infeasible to contact each of the donors to obtain consent every time a new research use is contemplated, yet IRBs are reluctant to approve the use of blanket consent for unspecified uses. One way to avoid this problem is for prospective sample donors to be given a menu of possible uses of their samples. Such a list might include research in mental health, HIV/AIDS, cancer, cardiovascular disease, or other areas. The donors would then have the opportunity to approve the use of their specimens for all or some of the listed uses. Other disclosures necessary to obtain informed consent include the financial interests of the biobank and researchers, whether individuals may elect to be notified of research findings, and whether it is possible for an individual to withdraw his or her sample from the bank (Rothstein, 2002). 

The demonstration that neither of the ions-at-any-price views, the main rivals of the pseudo-cationic theory, is compatible with the facts does not, of course, prove the ester theory. As I pointed out in my introduction, it is not possible to prove any scientific theory. What has been demonstrated, however, is that the ester theory will account for most of the established facts it has the advantage of being based in conventional organic chemistry, and it provides interesting guide-lines for future research and innovation. 

We foremost express our deepest thanks to our colleagues who spent considerable time and effort in writing the chapters in this book. We hope that this book will be useful to those interested in the subject of nanocarbon hybrids from many different perspectives and that it will establish a sound foundation for future research. We further would like to thank Julia Lauterbach and Karin Sora of De Gruyter Publishers for their tireless support and guidance. It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the students of the Munster group for their invaluable help in proof-reading. 

The results for the non-BO diagonal polarizability are shown in Table XIII. Our best—and, as it seems, well-converged—value of a, 29.57 a.u., calculated with a 244-term wave function, is slightly larger than the previously obtained corrected electronic values, 28.93 and 28.26 a.u. [88,91]. It is believed that the non-BO correction to the polarizability will be positive and on the order of less than 1 a.u. [92], but it is not possible to say if the difference between the value obtained in this work and the previous values for polarizability are due to this effect or to other effects, such as the basis set incompleteness in the BO calculations. An effective way of testing this would be to perform BO calculations of the electronic and vibrational components of polarizability using an extended, well-optimized set of explicitly correlated Gaussian functions. This type of calculation is outside of our current research interests and is quite expensive. It may become a possibility in the future. As such, we would like the polarizability value of 29.57 a.u. obtained in this work to serve as a standard for non-BO polarizability of LiH. 

In future research, it may be interesting to combine supported liquid phase (SLP) catalysts or supported aqueous phase (SAP) catalysts [61,62] with SCCO2 as a mobile phase. 

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