Are there phase transitions in liquid metallic alloys?

Karim Khalouk (1) , Moussa Mayoufi (2) , Jean-Georges Gasser (1)

1 LPMD - Laboratoire de Physique des Milieux Denses
2 Chimie

Recently, resistivity measurements of some liquid metals and metallic alloys have been published using an electrode technique. A marked change of the slope of the resistivity versus temperature has been observed following the history of the alloy in the liquid state and the authors conclude to "structural transitions in the melt". It is interesting to examine such effects and to try to understand their origin. In this work, the resistivities of several liquid metals and metallic alloys have been measured as function of temperature. A particular attention has been given to the history of the alloy including solidification and melting conditions. We also observed "anomalies". Our experiments lead us to conclude that they must very probably be attributed to the release of gas or vapour bubbles in the liquid alloy at the first heating resulting from a decomposition of compounds like oxides or hydroxides of the metals not from a phase transition in the liquid metallic state like "breaking" Sn-Sn covalent bands.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

Karim Khalouk, Moussa Mayoufi, Jean-Georges Gasser. Are there phase transitions in liquid metallic alloys?. Philosophical Magazine, 2010, 90 (20), pp.2695-2709. ⟨10.1080/14786431003745310⟩. ⟨hal-00596602⟩