Electrical resistivity and structure of liquid Al-Ge alloys

Abstract

Aluminium is very reactive with the quartz glass vessel generally used for electrical resistivity measurement cells. In the paper the authors describe a new geometrical arrangement to measure accurately the electrical resistivity of liquid alloys, using an alumina vessel. They give experimental results for the Al1-xGex liquid alloys. This system presents an anomalous concentration-dependent temperature coefficient of the resistivity, with respect to the calculated curves, when using the Faber-Ziman formula with pseudopotential form factors and hard-sphere partial structure factors. The authors have measured total structure factors of four Al-Ge alloys by neutron scattering on the 'Orphee' reactor at Saclay, using sapphire monocrystal cells. The temperature dependence of the total experimental structure factor explains qualitatively the anomalous resistivity temperature coefficient.