Quenching of vacancies in pure aluminium and in dilute aluminium-indium and aluminium-magnesium alloys

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Abstract
The increase in resistivity due to quenched-in vacancies was measured for zone-refined aluminium and two aluminium alloys based upon zone-refined aluminium containing indium and magnesium respectively. The alloys were made by levitation melting to minimize pick-up of other impurities. For the pure metal E Δ f, the activation energy for the formation of a vacancy, was found to be 0·76±0·02 ev, which is in good agreement with the values obtained by previous workers for lower purity metal but slightly lower than the one other value derived for zone-refined aluminium. The solute-vacancy binding energy B was computed from the difference between the apparent energy of formation in the alloys and in the pure metal to be 0·42±0·04 ev for an indium-vacancy pair and 0·29±0·03 ev for a magnesium-vacancy pair. The ratio of the resistivity of a bound vacancy to that of a free vacancy was estimated to be approximately 0·7 for a vacancy associated with an indium atom and approximately unity for one bound to a magnesium atom.