Radiation Decomposition of Pure Organic Compounds

Abstract

The fact that ionizing radiation can cause changes in organic has been known for many years, but it has only been in the last twenty to thirty years that much work has been done on determining the specific changes in organic produced by nuclear radiation, or equivalent artificially produced radiation. Indeed, real progress has been made in this field only in the last ten years or so. This review2 will attempt to cover only radiation changes of a chemical nature in organic produced by ionizing radiation. Changes is perhaps a better word than decomposition, since we wish to deal with a variety of effects observed from irradiation-among which effects are fusion (including dimerization and polymerization),3 molecular fission into many different size fragments, oxidation, reduction, rearrangement, and exchanges. By the term pure organic compounds we mean to exclude all solution work and mixtures of organic compounds. Since about half of the papers (1, 2) dealing with radiation effects that have appeared in recent years have concerned aqueous solutions, and of the remaining only a few are purely organic chemical studies, we are dealing with a rather specialized subject. Our subject is, however, fundamental to the effect of radiation on organic in aqueous solution, as it is a partial isolation of one of the contributors to the over-all changes observed in the irradiation of solutions.