Diffraction studies in polymeric and other beam sensitive materials may bring to mind the many experiments where diffracted intensity has been used as a measure of the electron dose required to destroy fine structure in the TEM. But this paper is concerned with a range of cases where the diffraction pattern itself contains the important information.In the first case, electron diffraction from paraffins, degraded polyethylene and polyethylene single crystals, all the samples are highly ordered, and their crystallographic structure is well known. The diffraction patterns fade on irradiation and may also change considerably in a-spacing, increasing the unit cell volume on irradiation. The effect is large and continuous far C94H190 paraffin and for PE, while for shorter chains to C 28H58 the change is less, levelling off at high dose, Fig.l. It is also found that the change in a-spacing increases at higher dose rates and at higher irradiation temperatures.
