94 research outputs found
CASSCF calculations for photoinduced processes in large molecules: Choosing when to use the RASSCF, ONIOM and MMVB approximations
No full text25/09/12 meb, Author version attached, OK to pub.In this article, we compare and contrast the RASSCF, ONIOM and MMVB electronic structure methods for calculating relaxation paths on potential energy surfaces of the excited states of large molecules, and for locating any resulting conical intersections at which nonadiabatic decay can take place. Each method is treated here as an approximation to CASSCF, which we choose as our reference level of theory, but which becomes prohibitively expensive computationally for large molecules. Both MMVB and ONIOM are hybrid computational methods – combining different levels of theory in an energy plus derivatives calculation at a particular molecular geometry – but they differ fundamentally in that MMVB is a hybrid-atom method, whereas ONIOM is a hybrid-molecule method. We explain this distinction through four representative applications: the photostability of pyracylene (studied with CASSCF, RASSCF, MMVB); large geometry changes in the singlet excited states of triangulene (studied with MMVB); a model for interstitial nickel defects in a synthetic diamond lattice (studied with ONIOM CAS:UFF); and the photochemical [4 + 4] cycloaddition of cyclohexadiene to naphthalene (studied with ONIOM CAS:MMVB). We show that each method is more appropriate for a particular type of photochemical problem. This article is part perspective, part review, and contains new results for three multi-state or photoinduced processes in complex systems
Chinese learning goes West : the reception and development of traditional Chinese thought in modern Europe, North America, and beyond : Session B
No full textThe symposium is organized by Prof. Stephen RODDY and Prof. CAI Zong-qi. The session is moderated by Prof. Stephen RODDY and the closing remarks is delivered by Prof. CAI Zong-qi. Each presentation is followed by a Q&A session. Session B includes the following presentations, The “Porcelain” Pagoda of Nanjing as Design Fiction, ca. 1400-1900 / Ellen HUANG, ArtCenter College of Design Yogācāra, Compulsive Behavior, and Life-Sustaining Creativity / Chta-ju CHANG, Brooklyn College, and Kurt SPELLMEYER, Rutgers University Max Weber, Charisma, and Confucian Ethics / ZHANG Chunjie, University of California, Davis Chinese Tragedy and the Political Life of Literary Criticism / Nan Z. DA, University of Notre Dame Where was China?: Qing Geodesy to the Early Modern World / Minghui HU, UC Santa Cruz Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and Other Worthy Sages of the Bamboo Grove / Jason WIRTH, Seattle University
This symposium is under the auspice of a broader project on the dissemination of Chinese culture led by Professor Yuan Xingpei of Peking University. Symposium papers, after successful peer-review, will be published in a volume in the Brill book series Chinese Texts in the World
Attending the languages of the other: recuperating
No full textThis dissertation engages in an examination of three Asian North American authors' acts of reclaiming "Asia." I discuss the attempts made by Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, and Nora Okja Keller to recuperate their ancestral land as a force that intervenes in their normative North American perceptions, discursive practices, and subject constructions. Despite the current popularities in the Asian North Americanists' transnationalist, diasporic, and/or internationalist reclaimings of "Asia," what has been rarely explored is the ways in which "Asia" emerges in these authors' narratives as the Other that intervenes, disrupts, and problematizes their North American part of perceptions and experiences. It is this exploration I undertake.
My dissertation also investigates how my authors negotiate their need to seek recognitions from their dominant nations and to simultaneously disrupt the traditional and hegemonic narratives by which they procure those recognitions. In particular, I will look at the ways in which my authors reconstruct the memories of World War II: the North American internment, the atomic bombing in Japan, Japanese colonialism and sexual enslavement of Korean women as well as the difficulties of narrativizing those memories within the North American context. Through these acts, my authors try to delineate, explore, and redress their present state of racial-ethnic experience and to seek the forms of political subjectivities in North America.
I submit that this process of negotiation, the simultaneous claiming and disclaiming each author engages, is closely connected with their endeavor to envision "Asia." All three authors try to read, configure, and make sense of this signifier of Otherness and to attend the (non)languages of the Other which they initially dismissed as silence and/or noises. The dissertation explores how my three authors perceive, in their different ways, their Asian Other's linguistic articulations as what makes them interrogate their normative North American perceptions and discursive practices. Consequently, I argue that the "two languages" the authors try to access enables them to destabilize their singular perspective and vision, allowing them to interrogate their own monolingualist normality. Finally, I investigate some instances in which this act of attending can also risk becoming an act of owning and possessing.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-248)by Rika Nakamu
Varieties of contingent experience: practicing pragmatism in the twenty-first century academy
No full textThis dissertation develops, analyzes, and enacts a pragmatic understanding of Pragmatist contingency to innovate a new form of the dissertation as genre. In both its form and content, “Varieties of Contingent Experience” theorizes and performs an experientially-inflected understanding of relations-in-flux in order to: a) consider the manifestation of Pragmatist relationality in the literary careers of two prominent American authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; b) examine the perpetual “crisis” plaguing graduate study in the humanities in the twenty-first century; c) promulgate an understanding of writing pedagogies that is attuned to epistemological relationality and contingency; and d) reimagine the genre of the “dissertation,” and, by extension, the institutional roles and values to which it ostensibly relates. Taken as a whole, this dissertation offers a Pragmatist and pragmatic reconsideration of what a dissertation can do when conceived as a document that locates the conditions of knowledge creation not in coherent absolutes (institutional; pedagogical; epistemological), but in the experience of relationality itself: the liminality of proximate contact. In modeling a new version of the genre rooted in that brand of experience, this dissertation respects and reflects the conditions of contingency that suffused its making. Central to the argument I advance about what that genre might do is a reflection on my own dissertation-writing process. This self-reflexive critique—which attends to the contingency-inflected experiences inherent in the roles of doctoral student and non-tenure-track full-time instructor—is Pragmatically valuable in that it serves as a metonymic reflection of the institutions, habits, and presumptions that govern the dissertation-as-genre and its relation to contemporary academic life.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
The Berlin CN-Van-de-Graaff injector
No full textThe Berlin CN-Van-de-Graaff accelerator has been converted into a heavy ion injector. Main parts of this conversion including the high vacuum tube, the differential pumping system, the new geometry of the spinning and the computer control philosophy are described.L'accélérateur Van-de-Graaff du type CN de Berlin a été transformé en injecteur d'ions lourds. Les éléments principaux de cette transformation, le tube accélérateur à vide élevé, le système de pompage différentiel, la nouvelle géométrie du spinning et le système de contrôle par calculateur seront décrits
The making of Gertrude Stein: reading, writing, and Radcliffe
No full textThis dissertation proposes three interwoven arguments concerning Gertrude Stein’s undergraduate education at Radcliffe College in the late 19th century. First, that Stein’s Sophomore writing course in 1894-1895 – English 22, Daily Themes – played a larger role
in the course of her writing life than has been understood in the fields of Modernism and
American literature. Second, that the first women of Radcliffe College, and before Radcliffe’s founding, of the Harvard Annex, were more integral to late 19th century growth in English and Composition at Harvard College than has been understood in the fields of
Rhetoric and Composition. Finally, that we cannot understand the expansion of Harvard College to Harvard University, the implementation of the elective system, or the founding of Radcliffe without integrating the various roles of Special Students – of which Gertrude Stein was one – in the broadening mission of the Cambridge institution. Following these threads, and focusing on Stein as an emblematic – though
idiosyncratic – student, I provide a history of Harvard-Radcliffe during the 1870s-1890s, a period of unprecedented change, the decades before and during Stein’s attendance from 1893-1898. I examine the role of female students in the origins of English Composition, a history which has previously focused heavily on male education as it emanated from Harvard and reverberated throughout higher education into the 20th century. I focus on Stein as a student of the pedagogy of Daily Themes practiced by Barrett Wendell. In providing these institutional, historical, and pedagogical contexts, I aim to connect Stein,
the student writer, to the adult innovator, to form a trajectory from her English 22 course into her adult writing life. My goal is for us to understand “The Making of Gertrude Stein” as a consequence, in part, of her reading and writing at Radcliffe. This is an educational
history of one of America’s great modernist writers embedded in the institutional history of her alma mater.
In order to help further research on Gertrude Stein’s undergraduate writing, my dissertation includes in its appendices the digitized images of Stein’s Daily Themes for English 22 at Radcliffe and my annotated transcription of the Themes including professorial comments.Ph.D.Includes abstractVitaIncludes bibliographical referencesby Michelle J. Brazie
Classically Forbidden Recurrences in the Photoabsorption Spectrum of Lithium
No full textWe present data on the photoabsorption spectrum of lithium atoms in an electric field at energies between the saddle point of the Stark potential and below the field-free ionization threshold. The spectrum displays a sequence of sharp resonances and a sequence of broad ones. We find that the broad resonances arise from the classically forbidden reflection of waves above a dynamical potential barrier. The recurrence spectrum is also observed and it is dramatically affected by above-barrier reflections. We have developed a semiclassical theory that interprets the spectra using quasiclassical trajectories that undergo above-barrier reflection.Physic
Extracting Classical Trajectories from Atomic Spectra
No full textWe describe how to reconstruct individual classical trajectories from spectroscopic data. The ac dipole moment of a trajectory can be found from the effect of an oscillating field on the spectrum. The inverse Fourier transform of such data yields the component of the electron trajectory along the direction of the oscillating field. We demonstrate the method by experimentally extracting z(t) for two electron trajectories that influence the Stark spectrum of Rydberg lithium. Within the experimental resolution, the reconstructed orbits agree well with classical predictions.Physic
Differential stability of 2'F-ANA*RNA and ANA*RNA hybrid duplexes: roles of structure, pseudohydrogen bonding, hydration, ion uptake and flexibility
No full text14 pags., 7 figs., 3 tabs.Hybrids of RNA with arabinonucleic acids 2′F-ANA and ANA have very similar structures but strikingly different thermal stabilities. We now present a thorough study combining NMR and other biophysical methods together with state-of-the-art theoretical calculations on a fully modified 10-mer hybrid duplex. Comparison between the solution structure of 2′F-ANA•RNA and ANA•RNA hybrids indicates that the increased binding affinity of 2′F-ANA is related to several subtle differences, most importantly a favorable pseudohydrogen bond (2′F-purine H8) which contrasts with unfavorable 2′-OH-nucleobase steric interactions in the case of ANA. While both 2′F-ANA and ANA strands maintained conformations in the southern/eastern sugar pucker range, the 2′F-ANA strand's structure was more compatible with the A-like structure of a hybrid duplex. No dramatic differences are found in terms of relative hydration for the two hybrids, but the ANA•RNA duplex showed lower uptake of counterions than its 2′F-ANA•RNA counterpart. Finally, while the two hybrid duplexes are of similar rigidities, 2′F-ANA single strands may be more suitably preorganized for duplex formation. Thus the dramatically increased stability of 2′F-ANA•RNA and ANA•RNA duplexes is caused by differencesin at least four areas, of which structure and pseudohydrogen bonding are the most important. © The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press.Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (grants
CTQ2007-68014-C02-02 to CG and BIO2009-10964 to
MO); Fundacion Marcelino Botin (grant to MO);
Canadian Institutes for Health Research (grant to
M.J.D.); Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada (postgraduate scholarship to
J.K.W.). Funding for open access charge: Canadian
Institutes for Health Research
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