Comment on “preparation of amorphous films of tin by quench condensation with impurities”

A recent paper by Buck 1] reported on a detailed investigation of quenchcondensed tin films with additions of various impurities. It was shown that the highest temperature to which an amorphous lattice order persisted scaled with the concentration of valence electrons, thus indicating that the amorphous state would be dependent on the electronic structure. Here, we show that the same crystallization temperatures also scale with the melting point of the impurity element in agreement with our previous observations 2], i.e. crystallization can be understood as due to the onset of impurity diffusion. It is also shown that the latter explanation, but not the former, can account as well for data on lead and thallium based compounds, indicating the more universal nature of the scaling of the crystallization temperature with the impurity element melting point.