Recovery of quenched-in resistivity in doped gold

Summary  Changes in electrical resistivity of quenched gold wires, to which small amounts of silver, nickel, and antimony were added, have been studied in detail at annealing temperatures in the range (20÷170) ‡C. Some results with Ag-doped specimens were explained in a previous paper by assuming the formation of vacancy-impurity complexes whose binding energy is about 0.3 eV. The results with Ni-doped specimens are qualitatively similar but suggest a very small binding energy of the vacancy-Ni atom complex. Evidence of motion of defects is also obtained at low temperature. In the case of Sb-doped specimens different features are noticed, the deviations from the kinetics of vacancies in pure gold being more apparent for specimens containing small amounts of impurities than for more heavily doped specimens.