Une détermination du coefficient d'autodiffusion de surface en présence d'une couche d'adsorption à l'aide de pointes àémission de champ (nickel sur tungsténe)

The tip blunting technique to measure the surface self-diffusion of clean metals (A. Piquet, Vu Thien Binh, H. Roux, R. Uzan and M. Drechsler) is extended to study the influence of an adsorption layer on diffusion. The system studied is nickel on tungsten. The increase of the apex radius is measured by means of FEM characteristics. In the temperature range used (1200–1500 K), the nickel monolayer (1.16 × 10¹⁵ atoms/cm²) is maintained by compensation of desorbed Ni atoms with a continual flux from an evaporation source. The adsorption life time between 1350 and 1500 K decreases from 850 to 16 s. The conservation of the degree of coverage leads to a method to determine the desorption activation energy of nickel (E_d = 4.56 eV/atom). The surface self-diffusion data of tungsten with a nickel monolayer are found to be D₀ = 3 × 10^?3cm/²s and Q_s = 1.9 eV/atom, compared to the clean tungsten data D₀ = 1 cm²/s and Q_s = 3.1 eV/atom. The Ni monolayer increases the surface self-diffusion coefficient by a factor 160 at 1200 K and 20 at 1500 K. The results are discussed with respect to nickel activated sintering of tungsten powders.