Special colloquium on Wednesday, March 14 Professor Wick Haxton Physics Department University of Washington, Seattle Dr. Haxton is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. These anions are exceedingly weakly bound and are subject to collisional detachment as well as detachment by modest electric fields. In cases where a molecule has a dipole or quadrupole moment of sufficient strength to permanently bind an extra electron but also possesses a bound valence anion, the multipole-bound state and valence state interact to form a coupled system. The Coulomb barrier can act to make a multiply charged anion more stable with respect to electron loss than its singly charged parent. This simple picture qualitatively explains many of the prominent features of multiply charged anions.
Gravity is the missing link in unification theory.
A SEE mission would improve our knowledge of a number of gravitational parameters and effects which are needed to test unification theories and various modern theories of gravity. SEE is a comprehensive gravitation experiment. Many modern materials with interesting and useful properties have significant defects and disorder. What is apparent is that as we seek to make materials smarter and to engineer precisely specified properties, their structures, microstructures and defects must be fully understood and controlled. This presents special challenges to experimentalists and new and improved techniques will be required to fully understand structure on the nanometer length-scale.