| Abstract: | We show that two quite recent treatments of dislocation-mediated melting transitions result in the thermal energy associated with the melting temperature, T m, being expressed as a product of a volume factor and a combination of elastic constants times a lattice structure-dependent factor. We further show that the result for the latent heat of fusion L m obtained in one of these studies leads to the ratio L m/GΩ, where G is the shear modulus at melting and Ω the atomic volume, being a constant. Since the ratio of the vacancy formation energy to GΩ is also found to be roughly constant, we suggest that the factor GΩ at melting is crucial in determining the melting temperature, the latent heat of fusion and the vacancy formation energy and we comment on the reasons why this should be so. |
