Measurement of density and structural short-range order of levitated liquid metals

The determination of thermophysical properties and structure of undercooled metallic melts must be accomplished by contactless methods due to the high reactivity of the material. It has been shown that electromagnetic levitation provides high-purity conditions to allow deep undercooling. The density and thermal expansion of a levitated drop can be derived from volume measurements using a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and a digital image processing system. Combining levitation with extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy leads to the possibility of studying the local structure of the liquid in a wide temperature range including the deeply undercooled regime.