5 June 1952

Dr. Robinson D. Burbank

K-25 laboratory

Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Co.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Dear Dr. Burbank:

I enclose a copy of a Note that I have just sent off to Professor Fankuchen for consideration for publication in Acta.

Some tine ago I received a number of technical reports from the Laboratory for Insulation Research, including your report on the crystal structure of β selenium. Unfortunately I did not read your report at the time, and so was not aware of the structure assigned to the molecule in this crystal until the last issue of Acta arrived, last week. Your proposed structure disturbed me considerably because of the difficulty in making it compatible with the principles of structural chemistry, and I was accordingly pleased when I found that a rather small change in the structure would make it satisfactory.

You no doubt had good reason to eliminate the y parameter value 0.318 for atom one, in your derivation of the structure. I feel, however, that an error must have crept into the work. I hope that you will have an opportunity to check up on the okl intensities and the Fourier projection along the axis. If it is not possible for you to do this under your present circumstances, perhaps you would be willing to send the experimental values of |F| for this zone to us, in order that we could check on the proposed change in parameters. Also, do you have values of |F| for general forms hkl? If you have, perhaps I could get someone here to carry out a three-dimensional treatment of your data, for joint publication with you.

You probably know that Dr. King carried out his work on the two forms of red selenium in our laboratories, nearly twenty years ago. The development of x-ray techniques is clearly shown by your success in tackling both of these structures, after he had felt that an attack at that time was hopeless.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling:W