Pulse radiolysis is a recent method of initiating fast reactions to study reactions occurring on a timescale faster than approximately one hundred microseconds, when simple mixing of reagents is too slow and other methods of initiating reactions have to be used.
The technique involves exposing a sample of material to a beam of highly accelerated electrons, where the beam is generated by a linac. It has many applications. It was developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by John Keene in Manchester and Jack W. Boag in London.