Dear Sir: I just ran across your exchange of
ideas on FeCo order etc. about this time last year. I did some
experiments in the mid 60s (Trans. Met. Soc AIME 236 (1966) 14ff.) on
FeCo2V and showed that the superlattice xray line [100} can be seen in
brine-quenched thin strips if the XRD is done with CoKa radiation. The
lines are very broad in as-quenched state and the peak narrows gradually with
time of reheating to a few hundred degrees C. The interpretation was that
we were seeing APB domains which were unexpected but seemed obvious in
hindsight--two interpenetrating, multiply-connected domains sort of like "swiss
cheese" (J. W. Cahn called it "sponge" at the time--he wrote an elegant
mathematical analysis that appeared in Acta Met.). The "scale" of
interconnection changes with time at temperature as the structure coarsens to
reduce the energy associated with APB. I thought the picture was confusing since
"perfect order with very fine domain size" could as well be described as
partial, or incomplete order due to large number of wrong near neighbors. I
don't know if there are other alloys or chemical combinations in which B2 order
is present with very fine domain structure such as I described. I am not aware
of any other work that confirmed or reinterpreted my results. Any comments?
Alan English
Summit NJ