COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Isaac Bersuker (seated, second from right) with the Moldova team.

Isaac B. Bersuker took a three-week trip to Moldova in July 1999. Bersuker’s goal for this trip was to expand on a cooperative program started under the 1997-1998 Twinning Program. Due to the fact that the Moldovans involved in that two-year project subsequently emigrated from Moldova, Bersuker needed to identify and establish collaboration with a new partner. Therefore the goal of this COBASE visit was to prepare materials for an NSF proposal with his new Moldovan colleague, Boris S. Tsukerblat. A draft of the grant application to NSF has been prepared with the help of Bersuker, Tsukerblat, and Ivan Ogurtsov, another Moldavian scientist involved in the project. The title of the proposal is "The Jahn-Teller and Pseudo Jahn-Teller Effects in Exchange Coupled Transition Metal Clusters." In realization of this project, the experience in evaluation of JT and pseudo JT effects accumulated for many years by Bersuker will be combined with that of Tsukerblat and Ogurtsov in studies of exchange coupled TMC, as well as with the recent results obtained in the 1997-1998 Twinning Program. During his stay in Moldova, Bersuker visited the Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova. He reports that in spite of the general degrading of conditions for research in Moldova, the Institute of Chemistry manages to perform considerable basic research work. This is made possible by additional income, as parts of the research group are engaged in commercial activity and part of the chemistry building is leased to other businesses. In his report, Bersuker states that laboratory conditions are bad, especially in the experimental laboratories: they have had no facility innovation in more than a decade. The theoretical groups do have some computers that have been donated from different sources.