Some Thoughts About Future Experiments

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT FUTURE EXPERIMENTS 

The ILIT program at Brookhaven National Laboratory has been terminated. We have demonstrated that our best instrumentation can now attain nanosecond and possibly subnanosecond time resolution (Sec. IV.E Fig. 6). The holy grail for those who study ultrafast interfacial kinetics remains the development of a pump-probe technique whose time resolution would be limited only by the operative physical chemical processes (see Sec. V.E). We did not achieve that goal, but ILIT could be a component in 

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The response times of neat SAMs in the absence of a redox moiety Our theoretical analysis for the ILIT response has presumed that dC /dt is infinitely fast—if that is not the case, extracting meaningful values of will be difficult, if not impossible. We have already mentioned evidence of a slow response of SAMs formed from 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid [113] (Sec. VII). We expect that the results of these types of experiments will be critically dependent upon the choice of the SAM constituent, the SAM preparation, substrate metal, temperature, the solvent, and the electrolyte ions (the less hydrophobic, the better). A thorough study of the potential of zero response would be important and informative. Establishing which films exhibit the fast responses will be critical for any meaningful studies of fast interfacial electron-transfer kinetics. 

Electron-transfer kinetics using SAMs in nonaqueous solvent systems with obvious concern about the stability of SAMs in these solvents) The decrease in the dielectric constant of the solvent coupled with a likely decrease in the reorganization energy and a likely increase in the accessible temperature range should yield some valuable information. 

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VIII. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT FUTURE EXPERIMENTS 166... 

Discussion Because this comes at the end of your thesis, and some parts can only be written after you have all the results in place, the temptation is to leave the discussion to last. This means that it can be rushed - not a good idea because of the weight attached by assessors to your analysis of data and thoughts about future experiments. It will help greatly if you keep notes of aims, conclusions and ideas for future work as you go along (Fig. 11.1). Another useful tip is to make notes of comparable data and conclusions from the literature as you read papers and reviews. 

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