Institute of Metals Division - The Mechanism of Surface Self-Diffusion on Metals (TN)

TWO recent papers1,2 cite measurements of surface contour changes on copper which, when attributed to surface self-diffusion, can be interpreted to yield activation energies for surface self-diffusion that approach1 or exceed2 those reported for volume self-diffusion in the same metal.3 It is acknowledged2 that AS must be assigned much too large a value to be physically reasonable in order to make the theoretical Do's agree with the experimental values, if the jump distance is of the order of the interatomic distance. However, long jumps would probably lead to marked anisotropy on planes that consist of ridges and valleys (like (110) in fcc) whereas only mild