“…As early as 1995, Hirt and co-workers had successfully applied e-beam irradiation on PAN fibers to reduce the stabilization time, and they revealed that the e-beam can initiate radical-induced cyclization of PAN polymer chains [9]. Since then, many efforts have been devoted to study the effect of e-beam irradiation on the stabilization behavior of PAN fibers [2,15,16,17,18,19]. However, successful preparation of carbon fibers based on e-beam irradiation pretreatment is rarely reported, and the application of e-beam irradiation to industrial production of carbon fibers is delayed.…”