Structure of Liquid Mercury

Abstract

Because the only available studies of the temperature dependence of liquid mercury's x-ray scattering contain false peaks in the intensity, a re-examination has been made over a 60° range (-36° to 26°) under precisely reproducible geometry. The fact that there is little variation in observed intensity and in the derived radial distribution function is consistent with the small density decrease (1%) over the range, and with the idea that scattering from hard spheres depends only upon density. The mean number of nearest neighbors is 7.5 centered at 3.03 Å.