The stacking-fault energy of silver

Abstract

Many specimens of deformed silver and gold have been examined for the presence of extended nodes. The figure shows extended nodes in pure silver. The average value of node radius, R, is 450 ± 150 Å. This observation of nodes is a common one and in a specimen deformed 3% in tension there are approximately 10¹¹ such nodes per cubic centimetre. The silver used in these experiments was supplied by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (Cominco 69 grade silver) and has a nominal purity of 99.9999%. Similar observations have been made on Johnson, Matthey spectrographically standardized silver. On the other hand, in the examination of Johnson, Matthey spectrographically standardized gold we have not observed any nodes of measurable extent. Thus it is thought that the mean node radius in gold is less than about 200 Å.