The formation and motion energies of vacancies in aluminium

Abstract

Abstract The resistance quenched into pure aluminium wires has been measured as a function of quench temperature for four quench speeds, varying by a factor of 200. The resulting data are consistent with the theory of Flynn et al. (1965), which assumes that the vacancy loss during a quench occurs by migration of single vacancies to fixed sinks. Although the data determine vacancy formation and motion energies of about 0·71 ev and 0·77 ev respectively for Q = 1·48 ev, an examination of previous experiments and of possible sources of random and systematic error in the present experiment suggests that the actual formation energy might be slightly higher than this value. The values Ef =0·73±0·03 ev and Em = 0·75±0·08 ev are proposed as the best presently available for aluminium.