Anne Davidson is a faculty member of the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI- Jussieu). She visited the MRL in July and August 1999.

Her major focus of research is the thermal stability of heterogeneous catalysts. She is particularly interested by micro and mesoporous matrices functionalized by addition of heterogeneous elements and by their thermal behaviour when guest molecules are introduced within their porosity.

During her stay at the MRL she will work with Prof. A.K. Cheetham's group, investigating halocarbon separations with zeolitic materials. This includes vibrational characterizations, adsorption thermodynamics and kinetics studies, structural studies on sorbate location and computer modelling. She will use vibrationnal spectroscopies (Infrared, Raman) to study the specific sites of interaction between model halocarbon sorbates and zeolitic frameworks. In the specific case of fluorinated sorbates, she will study modifications in the chemical nature and the thermal behaviour of the framework due to fluorination and dealumination processes.

Patricia Bassereau is a CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) research fellow working at the Curie Institute, Paris, in the Physico-Chimie Curie laboratory. She received her Ph.D. degrees from Montpellier University in Solid State Physics in 1985 and Physical Chemistry in 1990. She visited Prof. C.R. Safinya from mid-July to end of August 1999.

Her main research interest has been the structure of complex fluids or of polymeric monolayers. Recently, she has been more specifically interested in the physical properties of non-equilibrium model membranes and to their consequences in cell biology: active membranes (lipid membranes containing pumps or ionic channels), membranes in contact with a reservoir of lipids (endocytosis or exocytosis), lipid membranes interacting with the cytoskeleton.

Anne Boutin is in Universite Paris XI (Orsay) and is a research fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). She received her Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Orsay University in 1992. She visited the MRL from August to November 1999 during her sabbatical leave.

Her main research interest is in computer simulation (Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics) of adsorption of molecular fluids in micro and meso porous materials. She is deriving new simulation techniques, which include the use of bias sampling and improved intermolecular potentials, to compute adsorption isotherms, heats of adsorption and all sorts of structural data which should be of interest to the experimentalists. During her stay in MRL, she will work with Prof. A.K. Cheetham's group in the simulation of adsorption of halocarbon molecules in different zeolites.

Claude A. Daul is Professor of Computational Chemistry in the Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry of the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne. He studied at the Technical High School of the State Zürich and got his D. Phil. from the University of Fribourg in 1974. He also was a postdoc. in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the Oxford University. He visited the MRL from April to the end of July 2000 during his sabbatical leave.

His main research interests are: Computational Chemistry of Coordination Compounds and of Inorganic Materials; Electronic structure and reactivity calculation of these compounds and materials; prediction and description of their chemical, optical and magnetic properties; studies of their interactions with the surroundings. Modelling of Electrode Materials for Lithium Cells.

During his visit he plans to talk to several groups, especially to those interested in modelling and in computation - particularly he plans to collaborate with those of Nicola Hill and of Tony Cheetham.

Costantino Creton is a research fellow of the CNRS in France and undertakes his research work at the ESPCI (Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielle) in Paris. He has received his Ph. D. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University in 1992. He visited the MRL in july and august 1999, mainly to work with Prof. E.J. Kramer. His permanent address is: Costantino Creton, Laboratoire PCSM, ESPCI,10 Rue Vauquelin, 75231 Paris Cédex 05. H

His research interests are in the area of fracture and adhesion of interfaces between polymers. He is working more specifically towards a molecular and microscopic understanding of the adhesion mechanisms with a combination of optical, electron microscopy and surface analysis techniques as well as a variety of mechanical tests adapted to hard and soft polymers.

His current research projects include:

• adhesion between semi-crystalline polymers
• pressure-sensitive-adhesives, a microscopic description of the adhesion mechanisms
• plastic deformation mechanisms of a thin confined layer in a polymer multilayer structure

Hellmut Eckert from University of Münster visited the MRL for the duration of the Winter Quarter (January through March 1999).

Hellmut was a member at the UCSB Chemistry faculty from 1987 to 1995, and a member of the MRL from 1992 to 1996 before accepting a C-4 chair position in Physical Chemistry at the University of Münster, Germany. His main research interests concern the disordered (amorphous) solid state and its structural and dynamical characterization by NMR, EPR and Mössbauer spectroscopies. Current projects focus on the development and application of multidimensional NMR approaches for studying bond connectivity statistics and atomic distribution models in oxide and non-oxide optical glasses, catalytic materials and bioceramics. Hellmut also serves as an Associate Editor for the ACS journal "Chemistry of Materials".

During his current stay, Hellmut is pursuing several collaborative research projects with MRL and Chemistry faculty and students, concerning the structural characterization of new materials developed at the MRL. He is also teaching a Graduate course on the subject of Solid State NMR.

Alain Fuchs is a Professor of Physical Chemistry in Universite Paris XI (Orsay, France) and head of the laboratory of physical chemistry of amorphous materials in Orsay (UMR 8611, CNRS). He received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Orsay University in 1983. He visited the MRL from August to November 1999 during his sabbatical leave.

His main research interest is the behavior of molecular fluids in confined geometries. His activities concentrate on the change in the structural, dynamics and thermodynamics properties of the fluids (phase transitions, transport), due to the effect of the external field caused by the confinement. He has recently studied fluids in zeolites (with Anne Boutin, see above), and fluids confined in the Surface Force Apparatus. Alain also serves as a Regional Editor (Europe) for the journal "Molecular Simulation". During his current stay with Professor A.K. Cheetham's group, he will be devolopping collaborative research projects on modelling and computer simulation of systems of interest to the MRL.

Graciela Díaz de Delgado is a Professor of Chemistry at Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela. She received her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Brandeis University in 1988. She visited the MRL from August 1998 to August 1999 during her sabbatical leave.

Her research interest is in the crystal chemistry and solid state behavior of unsaturated metal carboxylates. These materials display interesting reactivity patterns when heated and/or irradiated with UV, gamma-rays, or X-rays. The course of the reactions is followed by spectroscopic techniques, thermal methods of analysis, and X-ray diffraction techniques. During her stay at MRL, she will work in Prof. A.K. Cheetham's group in the structural characterization of materials using single crystal and powder diffraction techniques, solid state NMR and computer simulation methods.

Rony Granek is a Senior Scientist at the department of Materials and Interfaces in the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received his Ph.D. Degree in 1990. He visited the MRL from July to September 1999 during his Sabbathical leave.

His research interest is in the dynamics of self-assembling surfactant systems and polymer networks (theory). One direction is theoretical investigation of instabilities in systems far from the equilibrium state and the transition towards equilibrium. Another path involves the structure and dynamics of systems at equilibrium. In particular, the following topics are considered: (i) Spontaneous emulsification: The spontaneous formation of a microemulsion phase from an initial state of separate oil and water phases in contact. (ii) Anomalous diffusion and reptation in membrane and polymer systems. (iii) Lamellar Phases: Formation of onions under shear flow. Defects and their response to shear flow.

Hans-Werner Schmidt from the Macromolecular Chemistry at University of Bayreuth, Germany visited the MRL in August.

His research interest is in Macromolecular Chemistry and Materials Science, focusing on - Synthesis, structure-property relations, processing and applications of polymers. Ongoing research projects include:

• Structural polymers: Temperature stable polymers, liquid crystalline polymers, polymers with macroscopic order.
• Functional polymers: Polymers in optics, opto-electronics and information storage, polymers for light emitting diodes and transport materials.
• Polymers in cosmetic and for medical applications: Concepts for the gelation of polymers, polyethylene glycol containing lipids. Combinatorial Chemistry in material science.

During his stay he will work with Prof. C. Safinya's group in IRG1 (Complex Fluids) on synthetic aspects of end group functionalized polyethylene glycol based lipids as building blocks for bioconjugates. This is an ongoing joint research project between the MRL and the University of Bayreuth.

Julia Higgins is Professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. Having gained her D.Phil in Oxford she worked in Manchester, Strasbourg and Grenoble before joining Imperial college in 1976. From January to the end of April 2000, she visited the MRL and Chemical Engineering during her sabbatical leave.

Her main research interests centre on the relationship between molecular organisation and dynamics and the material properties of polymers. She is well known for using neutron scattering techniques to study problems in these areas and currently one interest is the use of neutron reflection to study polymer interfaces. She is also much involved with fundamental studies of polymer blendsand the effect of flow on the miscibility limits in these.

During her visit she hopes to talk to several groups - particularly those of Ed Kramer, Phil Pincus and Glen Fredrickson about these and other interesting areas of polymer science.

John Hjort Ipsen from The Technical University of Denmark, Department of Chemistry, visited MRL in the period 14th to 28th of October, 1998.

His research interest is mainly in the field of the physical chemistry of lipid membranes, e.g. protein aggregation, forces between membranes, lipid-lipid and lipid-cholesterol mixtures, modulated structures in membranes, large-scale properties of membranes.

During his stay at MRL he focussed on the development of computer algorithms for Monte Carlo simulation of membrane assembly in collaboration with Claus Jeppesen.

Karl Petter Lillerud from University of Oslo (UiO) Department of chemistry, is visiting the MRL for one year, July 1998 to June 1999. His Office is 2027 in the MRL building, and his phone number is 7924.

His major focus on research is synthesis and characterizations of new microporous materials. The research effort has been concentrated on making new narrow pore system for new selective catalysts for process like the Hydro/UOP Methanol To Olefin process.

Solving structures both from XRD-powder and single crystal data is a natural main area of focus when novel materials are characterized. Computer based modeling are used both in relation to synthesis and in solving new structures.

Kurt Kremer is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. He is also an adjoint professor at the University of Mainz. He will be visiting the MRL from July 10, 2000 to July 20, 2000. His office is 3025 in the MRL building and his phone number is x5387.

His research mainly employs various computer simulation techniques to a variety of different problems in the general area of soft matter physics in close relation to either experiment or analytic theory or both. This covers models which contain some or all local chemical details as well as highly idealized models. Specific current research areas of his group include:

• computational physics methods/ applications
• statistical mechanics of soft matter (polymers, colloids, membranes)
• polymer networks
• polyelectrolytes
• liquid crystalline polymers
• structure property relation of polymeric materials

Harry Kroto is a Royal Society Research Professor in the School of Chemistry Physics and Environmental Science at the University of Sussex. He is a co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and was Knighted for contributions to Chemistry the same year. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Materials department at UCSB. He will be visiting the MRL in June and August. His office is 3031 in the MRL building and his phone number is x7913.

His research encompasses the chemistry of Fullerenes and nanoscale materials technology. Harry Kroto is the Chairman of the Vega Science Trust which is dedicated to making science for network TV and the Internet which focus on cultural and intellectual issues in science and technology.

Dov Levine from Technion, Haifa, Israel will be visiting the MRL until mid July 1998. His office is 3009 in the MRL building.

His research centers on various problems involving densely packed particles. Among these, granular materials and emulsions are two particularly interesting examples.

Granular materials may be thought of as collections of very hard heavy particles, which interact via a repulsive contact potential. In actuality, the force law is that due to Hertz, which is non linear and weaker than Hookean. The nature of stress propagation in such materials is the focus of considerable interest, and has yet to be satisfactorily understood. Likewise, the behavior of flowing granular materials has not been fully elucidated.

Emulsions are systems composed of fluid drops in a fluid background. Coalescence of the droplets is inhibited by the presence of a surfactant. At high enough concentrations, emulsions behave in a solidlike manner, in that they resist shear even at the lowest frequencies experimentally accessible. The unusual behavior of emulsion rheology at concentrations very near to close-packing appear to be due, in part, to a soft interaction potential between drops, as well as to intrinsic plastic deformation, even at the smallest applied strains.

Thierry Loiseau is a research fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) working in the group of Prof. G. Férey at the Institut Lavoisier (UMR 8637) of the newly created University of Versailles, France. He received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Chemistry from the University of Maine in Le Mans (France) in 1994 under the supervision of Pr. G. Férey and Dr. Fr. Taulelle (University of Strasbourg). He is visiting Prof. A.K. Cheetham from June to August 1999. His office is 2204 in the MRL building and his phone number is x5658.

His research interests are the area of hydrothermal synthesis and structural chemistry of microporous phosphates-like materials. His work has been concentrated on making new three-dimensional large pore structures incorporating fluorine into the framework.

José Miguel Delgado Quiñones is a Professor of Chemistry at Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela. He received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science from MIT in 1988. He will be visiting the MRL during his sabbatical leave from August 1998 to August 1999. His office is 2027C in the MRL building and his phone number is x7926.

His research interest is the synthesis and characterization of novel materials with interesting electro-optical and magnetic properties (semiconductors, superconductors, etc). In the past, he has focused his efforts on the structural characterization of materials using single-crystal techniques. During his stay at MRL, he will work in Prof. A.K. Cheetham's group in the structural characterization of inorganic materials using powder diffraction techniques and computer simulation methods.

Mahn Won Kim from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), is visiting the MRL from August 1999 until August 2000. His Office is 3009 in the MRL building, and his phone number is 7161.

His major focus on research is to understand and control self associating materials of amphiphilic molecules and functional polymers, and biomolecular materials by utilizing various experimental tools:

• Langmuir Surface Balance to understand a pseudo two dimensional phase behavior of surface active materials, such as surfactants, lipids and functional polymers.
• Micropattering of the self-organized materials by L/B techniques and Self-Assembled Films.
• Optical Second Harmonic Generation to measure the surface adsorption and composition and the molecular orientation at an interface.
• Surface Wave Spectroscopy to understand the hydrodynamic effects of the adsorbed macromolecules at an interface by measuring the surface wave power spectrum by heterodyne techniques
• Static and Dynamic Laser Light Scattering to probe the interaction and structure of complex fluids and to extend to find the relationship between the bulk and surface properties of soft matters.
• Micro-Scale Probe developments for the surface studies such as AFM, Neutron and X-ray reflectivity.

Noor.M.Butt, a Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, visited the MRL and Prof. A.K. Cheetham's group during June, 2000. He is an Experimental Solid State Physicist and his research interests are in atomic vibrations in solids using neutrons, X-rays and Mossbauer gamma-rays and he has published over 100 research papers in this field. For his Ph.D. thesis (1965) under the supervision of Professor P.B.Moon F.R.S at the University of Birmingam, U.K, he along with D.A. O'Connor developed the first Mossbauer gamma-ray diffractometer and used it for the first time for the experimental determination of Thermal Diffuse Scattering under the Bragg peaks of single crystals.

His current focus is on the "Correlations of micro property (atomic vibration mean square amplitudes) to the bulk properties of materials" the topic on which he gave a seminar at MRL. He has also worked at MRL on citation analysis as a tool for research quality assessment.

Patrick Davidson is a CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) research fellow working at Universite Paris Sud in Orsay, France. He is visiting Prof. C.R. Safinya in July and August 1999. His office is 2031 in the MRL building and his phone number is x7929. His address in France is Lab. de Physique des Solides, Bat 510, Univ. Paris Sud, 91405, Orsay cedex France.

His research interests span the area of molecular organization in complex fluids.

- Liquid Crystal Polymers
- Mineral liquid crystals and hybrid organic/inorganic mesophases
- Mesophases of surfactants

The experimental techniques he uses are X-ray and neutron scattering, and polarized light microscopy.

Manfred Rühle is visiting the MRL between March 25 and April 15, 1998. His office is 3025 (x5387) in the MRL building. His home address is: Max-Planck-Institue für Metallforschung, Seestr. 92, 70174 Stuttgart, Germany. Tel: +49-711-2095-319 Fax: +49-711-2095-320. He is the executive director of that institute.

His scientific activities concentrate on the microstructural classification of materials by a variety of techniques with emphasis on transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Rühle and his group determined the structure of various internal interfaces by quantitative high-resolution TEM (grain boundaries: Cu, Al₂O₃, SrTiO₃; metal/ceramic interfaces: Cu/Al₂O₃, Nb/Al₂O₃, Cu/TiO₂, Cu/SrTiO₃, Pt/SrTiO₃). In addition, at those interfaces segregation phenomena have been studied as well as the chemical and morphological stabilitity.

Wolfgang M. Sigmund from the Max-Planck-Institute für Metallforschung (MPI-M, PML) is visiting the MRL during the summer until the beginning of Sept. 1998. His Office is 2027 in the MRL building, and his phone number is 7924.

His major focus on research is on colloid powder technology of highly filled particle systems. Experimental techniques are atomic force microscopy to directly and in-situ measure interparticle potentials, ellipsometry to measure adsorbed layers of molecules especially layers of responsive polymers and rheology. The measured data is interpreted using DLVO theory and scaling theory of adsorbed polymers.

Novel colloidal near net shape forming techniques can be realized exploiting the effects observed in AFM and ellipsometry combined with chemical stability data for ceramics in water as well as polymer solubility. In general particle pair potentials are controlled by temperature, concentration and chemistry. A recent method that was designed according to this is "Temperature Induced Forming" (TIF).

Yasuo Y. Suzuki is a Senior Research Scientist at NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Japan. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of Tokyo in 1986. He had a postdoctral fellowship with the Physics and Materials Departments at UCSB, working with Prof. Alan J. Heeger and Prof. P. Pincus in 1989-1991. He is visiting the MRL from September 12 to December 12 1998. His office is 3009 in the MRL building and his phone number is 7161.

His research interest covers the following areas:

• Polymers and Gels:
  Polymers in curved, confined spaces
  Polyelectrolyte gels
• Strongly Correlated Electron Systems:
  Quantum Phase Transitions of Hubbard Model
  Superconductivity and Supersolids
• Conducting Polymers:
  Polaron/Bipolaron conductivity
  Tight-binding models for push-pull polyenes
  Finite size effects in conducting polymers