Universality of microscopic structural and dynamic features in liquid alkali metals near the melting point

Abstract

The assumption proposed in [U. Balucani et al., Phys. Rev. B 47, 3011 (1993)] that the space and time dependences of the characteristics of the microscopic structure and dynamics for the group of liquid alkali metals are reduced to a common general form through scaling transformations has been discussed. It has been found that such description is possible when scale units are (i) the effective size of a particle corresponding, in particular, to the experimentally measured position of the main peak in the static structure factor, (ii) the characteristic time scale of the thermal mean free path of the particle, and (iii) the parameters of the “liquid”–“crystal” phase separation (in particular, the melting temperature). This conclusion follows directly from the comparative analysis of experimental data on X-ray diffraction, as well as on the inelastic neutron and X-ray scattering data. This work develops the ideas proposed in [A. V. Mokshin et al., J. Chem. Phys. 121, 7341 (2004)].