AVS 59th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition
    Electronic Materials and Processing Friday Sessions
       Session EM+NS-FrM

Paper EM+NS-FrM11
A Deep Dive into the Liquid Fermi Sea

Friday, November 2, 2012, 11:40 am, Room 14

Session: Low-Resistance Contacts to Nanoelectronics
Presenter: R.K. Schulze, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Authors: R.K. Schulze, Los Alamos National Laboratory
J.C. Lashley, Los Alamos National Laboratory
B. Mihaila, Los Alamos National Laboratory
D.C. Wallace, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Correspondent: Click to Email
We reexamine high resolution photoemission in some of the liquid metals accessible in a UHV environment. These include Ga, In, and Bi, and at a basic level, involves comparison of the DOS EDCs between the crystalline solid and liquid metal. The motivation is to gain an understanding of the fundamental differences between normal and anomalous melters. This includes a search for an understanding of the electronic contribution to the melt phase transformation. Normal melters, such as In, show a difference in liquid and crystal solid entropy at constant volume, ΔS*=0.8±0.1 kb/atom, and exhibit a volume expansion upon melting, while anomalous melters, such as Ga and Bi, have ΔS*>>0.8 kb/atom, and show a volume collapse upon melting. Observed changes to the electronic structure near the Fermi energy upon crossing the solid-liquid phase boundary will be discussed.