COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

From September 2000 to February 2001, Victor Bagryansky of the Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion in Novosibirsk visited New Mexico State University to initiate a collaborative project with his host, Sergei Smirnov. The focus for the project was the study of spin dependent processes in charge recombination and dissociation for solid and liquid donor/acceptor solutions mimicking those used in organic light emitting diodes. The work, which involved the use of the photoinduced transient displacement current technique to measure and differentiate the ionic species, is ultimately aimed at discovering ways of increasing the yield of singlet recombining ion pairs.

Smirnov reports that the collaboration was both interesting and fruitful, and at least one paper should be submitted soon for publication. "Even though the main goal of the project has not been achieved," Smirnov states, "many interesting results were obtained, including observations of a short lifetime in contact ion pairs with Alq3, photoinduced proton transfer from chloroform to tertiary amines, and transient photovoltage and photocurrent in Alq/PNB solid polystyrene solutions." Future collaboration is now being planned to make the most of the complimentary capabilities of the Russian side in magnetically sensitive methods and of the American side in transient photocurrent techniques.