Editors:
M. Buback and A. M. V. Herk
WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH, 2007
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Content
doi:10.1002/masy.200790010
Preface
This
volume contains articles of the invited speakers at the
IUPAC-sponsored International
Symposium on "Radical Polymerization: Kinetics and
Mechanism" held in Il Ciocco (Italia) during
the week September 3-8, 2006. The conference was attended
by close to 200 people from all over the world with a
good balance between attendees from industry and academia.
About 40 per cent of the attendees were Ph.D. students,
who very actively participated in the scientific program.
This
symposium was the fourth within the series of so-called
SML conferences, which are the major scientific forum
for addressing kinetic and mechanistic aspects of free-radical
polymerization and of controlled radical polymerization.
The first SML meeting was organized by Ken O'Driscoll
and Saverio Russo at Santa Margherita Ligure (Italy) in
May 1987.The second SML meeting was held at the same location
by the same organizers in 1996.The third SML meeting was
organized in 2001 by Michael Buback from Gottingen University
and by Ton German from the Technical University of Eindhoven.
They selected the conference hotel at Il Ciocco as the
new symposium site. This venue is located in the beautiful
province of Lucca. Thus, the abbreviation SML, which originally
referred to Santa Margherita Ligure, now stands for Scientific
Meeting Lucca.
The
fourth SML meeting (September 3-8, 2006) was organized
by Michael Buback and by Alex van Herk from the Technical
University of Eindhoven. As has been fore- seen in the
last meeting, the number of contributions on controlled
radical polymerization (CRP) has significantly increased.
Four out of the eight sessions were devoted to CRP and
the organizers consequently decided to remove the word
'Free' from the conference heading. The symposium nevertheless
remains the number one forum where kinetic and mechanistic
issues are addressed in detail and depth for the entire
field of radical polymerization. Several important aspects
of radical polymerization have first been presented at
SML conferences, e.g., the groundbreaking pulsed laser
polymerization size-exclusion chromatography method for
the reliable measurement of propagation rate coefficients,
which has been introduced by Professor O.F. Olaj and his
group at SML I.
Distinctive
features of the conference are that all attendees stay
in the same hotel, that no parallel sessions are presented
and that the posters may be discussed throughout the entire
week. A total of 35 invited lectures have been given,
eight of which were selected from the submitted poster
abstracts. Moreover, 114 posters were presented, mostly
by research students. Most of the invited lectures are
reflected as written contributions in this issue of Macromolecular
Symposia. In addition, the six groups of authors, who
received most of the votes during the election of the
poster prize winners, were also invited to contribute
to this volume. It should be noted that all conference
attendees could participate in the voting procedure for
the poster prizes.
The symposium comprised five major themes: