Abstract
LONDON Royal Society, June 28. W. L. BBAGG:—The structure of alloys (Bakerian Lecture). An alloy phase has two characteristics. The first is the pattern of sites occupied by atoms irrespective of their nature. Each phase of an alloy system has a different pattern of sites, and therefore a change from one phase to another involves their complete re-arrangement. The second characteristic is the distribution of the atoms amongst these sites. This distribution may vary continuously without change of phase, from being random at high temperatures to being partially regular at low temperatures. The alloy is a system of dynamical equilibrium. Although interchange of atomic position at room temperature is infrequent, the alloy has received its character at some previous point in its history when the temperature was just sufficiently high for interchange to be important. Maxima and minima in physical properties at certain relative proportions, such as Fe3Al and AuCu3, are statistical effects, and do not imply the existence of corresponding compounds.
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Societies and Academies. Nature 134, 38–40 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134038b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134038b0