Surface plasmon resonance was utilized to enhance the electron transfer at silver/solution interfaces. Photoelectrochemical reductions of nitrite, nitrate, and CO{sub 2} were studied on electrochemically roughened silver electrode surfaces. The dependence of the photocurrent on photon energy, applied potential and concentration of nitrite demonstrates that the photoelectrochemical reduction proceeds via photoemission process followed by the capture of hydrated electrons. The excitation of plasmon resonances in nanosized metal structures resulted in the enhancement of the photoemission process. In the case of photoelectrocatalytic reduction of CO{sub 2}, large photoelectrocatalytic effect for the reduction of CO{sub 2} was observed in the presence of surface adsorbed methylviologen, which functions as a mediator for the photoexcited electron transfer from silver metal to CO{sub 2} in solution. Photoinduced reduction of microperoxidase-11 adsorbed on roughened silver electrode was also observed and attributed to the direct photoejection of free electrons of silver metal. Surface plasmon assisted electron transfer at nanostructured silver particle surfaces was further determined by EPR method.

Suppression of mass spectral peaks due to matrix problem is a major hurdle to overcome during identification work. So far, preliminary studies have been done in investigating solutions containing various percentages of nitric and hydrochloric acid. Since other anions would also be present in real samples, also needed to be examined is how the extent of suppression of metal complexes by Cl{sup {minus}} compares with suppression by other anions such as PO{sub 4}{sup 3{minus}} or SO{sub 4}{sup 2{minus}}. If suppression of other anions is as severe as that of the chloride ion, then it would be virtually impossible to analyze unknown samples containing large amount of such anions by direct infusion electrospray mass spectrometry. It seems like a separation step is needed to separate these matrix anions from the metal complexes prior to putting the solution through the electrospray. However, separation of inorganic complexes can be difficult and has not been studied thoroughly as LC separation of bioorganic compounds. Both zinc and copper chloro complexes have been observed to be more tolerant to higher amount of chloride ion present in a solution compared to the group I and II metal chloro complexes. Other transition metals including the lanthanide complexes need …

Collective Thomson scattering from ion-acoustic waves at 266nm is used to obtain spatially resolved, two-dimensional electron density, sound speed, and radial drift profiles of a collisional laser plasma. An ultraviolet diagnostic wavelength minimizes the complicating effects of inverse bremsstrahlung and refractive turning in the coronal region of interest, where the electron densities approach n{sub c}/10. Laser plasmas of this type are important because they model some of the aspects of the plasmas found in high-gain laser-fusion pellets irradiated by long pulse widths where the laser light is absorbed mostly in the corona. The experimental results and LASNEX simulations agree within a percent standard deviation of 40% for the electron density and 50% for the sound speed and radial drift velocity. Thus it is shown that the hydrodynamics equations with classical coefficients and the numerical approximations in LASNEX are valid models of laser-heated, highly collisional plasmas. The versatility of Thomson scattering is expanded upon by extending existing theory with a Fokker-Planck based model to include plasmas that are characterized by (0 {le} k{sub ia}{lambda}{sub ii} {le} {infinity}) and ZT{sub e}/T{sub i}, where k{sub ia} is the ion- acoustic wave number, {lambda}{sub ii} is the ion-ion mean free path, Z is the …