Structure of Expanded Fluid Metals

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Abstract
A survey is given of neutron diffraction investigations of the static structure factor S(Q) of liquid rubidium and cesium expanded by heating towards conditions close to their critical points. The data are used to derive the characteristic changes of the microscopic structure—such as the distance and number of nearest neighbours—as a function of density. After a brief discussion of recent measurements of the isothermal density derivative of S(Q) of expanded liquid cesium, which is related to the triplet correlation function, we describe the theoretical attempts which have been undertaken so far to extract information from the structure data about the density dependent changes of the effective interaction potential as the metalnonmetal transition is approached.