Vacancy formation and squashing during surface melting and the size effect on surface-induced melting of metals

Abstract

On the basis of a vacancy-squashing model for melting that we developed recently, a vacancy formed in the premelting liquid-like-layer is proposed to be squashed at the instance of its formation, which will significantly facilitate vacancy formation. Accordingly, the temperature for surface-induced melting and its size dependence are quantitatively calculated. By comparing the calculated data with the reported experimental results for metals, we show that the present approach may potentially predict the size-dependent melting point of other metals.

Keywords:

• melting
• surface melting
• vacancy squashing
• size dependence

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Open Project of Key Laboratory for Magnetism and Magnetic Materials of the Ministry of Education, Lanzhou University (Grant No. LZUMMM2010021), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. lzujbky-2013-183 and lzujbky-2011-127), the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry, the Natural Science Foundation of Gansu Province, China (Grant No.1208RJYA046), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51101077).