Transcending Lindemann's predictions for the melting temperatures of metals and for the long-wavelength limit of their liquid structure factors

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Lindemann's melting criterion remains useful. However, one prediction it makes for liquid metals (our focus here) is that the long-wavelength limit of the structure factor S(q) at freezing, S T m (0), where T m is the melting temperature, is a universal constant. For 34 metals we have calculated S T m (0) from input data, which is essentially the measured T m and the surface thickness L, defined near freezing as the product of isothermal compressibility and surface tension. To complete the characterization of S T m (0) we fit to one metal, chosen as Rb, for which S T m (0) is well established experimentally. For a wide variety of metals considered, S T m (0) is then found to vary by a factor of 10.