The Thermal Expansion of Crystals of Metallic Bismuth

A theory of the thermal expansion of regularly crystallising monatomic bodies was first proposed by Gruneisen. An important experimental for which this theory accounts is the constancy of the ratio of the coefficient expansion to the specific heat with varying temperature. There is no theory to the thermal expansion of non-regularly crystallising bodies, and when the sent work was started there were no data available as to the temperature variation of the coefficients of expansion of such bodies; it was carried out to spply such data for bismuth crystals and especially to study the behaviour the crystals near the melting point. Recently Gruneisen and Goens have some results which they have obtained for zinc and cadmium crystals, th which the present results are compared.