Dislocation etch pits in gold

Abstract

Newly developed etch-pitting technique for gold is reported. A one-to-one correspondence is obtained between etch pits and dislocations, with etchants of 1∶3 aqua regia and aqua regia plus suitable modifiers. The usefulness of these etchants has been established by several experimental results, such as the appearance of etch pit rosette patterns produced by indentation, correspondence between slip line and pit arrays in deformed crystals and climb polygonization arrays after annealing. It is also confirmed that the etchants are capable of differentiating positive and negative edge dislocations.