does die down. 



BURTON: The important point is that you believe that you have established 

 that a one-volt electron has produced an effect. 



POLLARD: It must be stressed that the cross section for this process of 

 one volt is very, very small, and in order to get somewhere near the ordinary 

 cross section which is associated with ionizing radiation, the energy has to be 

 much higher. Of the order of 5 to 20 volts. In that range. It is still going up 

 very quickly. 



BURTON: Will you have a word to say about why cross sections for one- 

 volt processes are so small? Do you think that the cross section is really very 

 small or that the finding is merely a reflection of your method of measurement? 



POLLARD: I think this is a secondary process of some kind. 



BURTON: Do you mean that something superimposed, like an electrostatic 

 effect is involved? 



POLLARD: I don't think it is that. No, I think there is a low energy method 

 of inactivation which is very inefficient. 



MAGEE: Like electron capture? 



POLLARD: It might be something like that. It is analogous to heat, but it 

 is not the same as heat. For instance, it is possible to calculate the heating of 

 these specimens, and we have thermal inactivation data very accurately plotted 

 and it can't be that. It would take about 150° in the dry state. It is not heat, 

 but it is what I personally think might be the "prepartition" effects of heat. That 

 is to say, you have there a fairly large number of excitations in the order of one 

 electron volt, which you don't normally get in the thermal case, and the mult- 

 iplicity of these, many of them present one after the other, gives the effect. 



CURTIS: In the case of your heat, how high does the energy run? 



POLLARD: Well, that is a hard one to answer. AH is the same as AF in 

 this case, and it runs about 1.2 ev. But while that fits very nicely with this 

 figure, I want to hurry to say that I am not at all sure that that is a very statisti- 

 cal piece of information, and, while it might apply to the very lowest possible 

 binding practical, it still is very hard to interpret it. That figure is a great big 

 average figure. 



CURTIS: But it is a nice order of magnitude. 



POLLARD: The two go together. If you try infrared, you don't seem to get 

 any effect. 



BURTON: Bond rupture is not necessarily involved. Why not a rearrange- 

 ment? It can be produced with much lower activation energy. 



POLLARD: I was merely taking the ion theory of the activated state literal- 

 ly, and this is passage over a hump of some kind. 



BURTON: However, such passage could involve a rearrangement, rather 

 than a rupture. 



