Reply to comments of Cook and Dryden on: Dimerization of impurity-vacancy dipoles in alkali halides

Abstract

Cook and Dryden do not point out any flaws in our analysis, but simply restate their case. We do not believe there are any flaws. We assume that the processes governing the initial rate of decay of the dipoles are association to form dimers, and dissociation only, neglecting the formation and dissociation of trimers. Neglect of the latter implies a range of validity to the solution of the equation, which we show to be $\frac{n_s}{n_0}>\frac{1}{3}$. We work out the consequences of these assumptions, and obtain a theory which is in excellent agreement with experiment, in its range of validity.