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Published: 1948

Total Pages: 86

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Since I have been given the privilege of making introductory remarks at the start of this conference on hot atom chemistry, I should like to make some observations about the background of the subject and to indicate some of the problems which appear to be of present interest. It is probably a safe generalization to say that most of the thousands of known nuclear transformations have significant chemical effects. This is automatically true for those reactions in which the nuclear charge changes, since then the product is a different chemical element. Whether or not this occurs, it is also the case that the net energy evolved is usually large compared to chemical bond energies and activation energies, so that one may expect bond rupture and other chemical reactions to occur if the energy is properly distributed among the various degrees of freedom. The energy is usually concentrated first on the particular atom in which the nuclear event occurred. The resulting energetic atom is called a 'hot atom', which term has given the name to our conference.