1971 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 162-166
Plastics, such as polycarbonate, cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate were irradiated with fast neutrons (2.5, 14MeV) and a count was made of the number of etch-pits on the surfaces of the irradiated material after etching with suitable chemical reagents. The experiments proved that the number of etch-pits increases with the etching time, and that at least during the early period of etching, a close correlation seems to exist between ΔP the increment in the number of etch-pits per unit area and Δl the increment of thickness of layer removed for a common increment of etching time Δt. In other words, an approximate relation ΔP/Δl=ρ was observed to hold during this early etching period, ρ being a constant that seems to correspond to the number of etchable damages produced by fast neutron irradiation per unit volume. The value of ρ was found to correspond roughly to the estimated number of recoil carbon and oxygen atoms in a unit volume in the case of polycarbonate which consists of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. This indicated that the etch-pits observed in polycarbonate might have developed at the sites of radiation damage caused by the recoil carbons and oxygens due to fast neutron irradiation.
This article cannot obtain the latest cited-by information.