I have a fairly decent understanding of the polymerization process as my Dad was a polymer engineer for his entire carreer.

What I'm having trouble with is I don"t know of any polymer prosseses that would yeild an exothermic reaction in a thousandths of a second. In fact the processes your describing which requires heat (endothermic) to initiate the catalyst phase produce condensate and heat during the chain phase(exothermic) and thats a relatively slow process as compared to oxidation reactions.

I'm not discounting what your seeing in your tests but from my (limited) knowledge it would seem that an oxidization reaction is more plausible