55 



dence, and the main thing I am going to emphasize is chemical evidence. 



KAMEN: You are assuming that your positive charge is staying where it 

 was formed? 



MAGEE: Yes. 



FANO: Shouldn't we try perhaps to fix this other point about recapture? 

 Dr. Onsager, didn't I understand from you yesterday (and it sounded quite the 

 obvious thing) that the probability of recapture if the thermalization happens at 

 distance r will be exp(-e2/fc rkT)? 



ONSAGER: Right. 



o 



FANO: If the value of€ is five, it is a distance of 100 A that make the dif- 

 ference. Anything within 100 A will have a high probability of recapture. Is 

 this the right figure: if you put in r = 100 and £. = 5, the exponent is one? 



PLATZMAN: That is Dr. Magee's view. Is that correct? 



MAGEE: I beg your pardon? 



PLATZMAN: It is your view that this gives the order of magnitude. 



MAGEE: No, I haven't used this. The situation here is that €. is a constant 

 and there is all the time in the world. You don't worry about how long it takes 

 the electron to get back. Isn't that right? 



ONSAGER: That is true. 



MAGEE: But if there is a 10" 11 second time limit before the dielectric 

 relaxes, the electron must move in sooner, or it is frozen out because the in- 

 crease in € weakens the electric field. 



FANO: So you say it is probably not so. 



PLATZMAN: At least I do not believe that, but I don't want to say anything 

 about it now. 







MAGEE: In other words, I would say if the electron does get to 150 A, then 

 before it can get back a significant distance the dielectric relaxes and freezes 

 it where it was and you will, indeed, have the electron separated from the ion. 

 I don't believe it ever gets far enough to do this, but I am just calling it to your 

 attention. 



I don't know whether all of you know about the experimental work of Gerrit- 

 sen (8) on conductivity. I don't think it will be worth our time to get into a dis- 

 cussion of conductivity, but let me say just a word about it and show you some 

 of his results. Let me call your attention also to the fact that now I am not 

 talking about water, because experiments in water have not been done; but 

 Gerritsen did some conductivity measurements in helium, argon, H2 and N2 

 under irradiation and calculated the quantity^ which would fit into the conduc- 

 tivity result. You see, it has all the theory of conductivity coming into it, but 

 the values of_b_ I found very interesting. Results are shown in table III. All 

 samples are liquids; "covered" and "uncovered" samples were used and I do 

 not know why different results were obtained for the two cases. 



