Random vibration movements of liquid nanosized Pb inclusions in Al

Transmission electron microscopy has been used to study the behavior of liquid nanosized Pb inclusions in Al ribbons made by rapid solidification. In situ heating experiments carried out in the temperature range from around 375 to 450°C have shown that liquid inclusions with sizes from around 10–50nm, that are trapped on dislocations, perform random vibrations around their positions of attachment with vibration periods of some fractions of seconds. The amplitudes of the vibrations in directions perpendicular to the dislocations are a few nanometers, while the motion in directions parallel to the dislocations can be more than an order of magnitude larger. Under conditions where two or more inclusions, attached to a dislocation line, display one-dimensional random motion the inclusions are rarely seen to coalesce. Movement of the inclusions has been monitored by video and shorter sequences have been digitized and analyzed frame-by-frame. The analysis shows that the step lengths have Gaussian distributions indicative of random walks. Fractal analysis of the paths shows that the fractal dimension is close to two which agrees well with the observations that the inclusions carry out linear random walks in a confined space.