Dislocations near to the melting point were modelled as non-interacting closed loops on a lattice, and simple expressions were derived - for the melting point and latent heat of fusion - that depended upon the dislocation density at the melting point. Experimental data on more than half of the elements of the periodic table were used to deduce the dislocation density from both relationships. It was found that melting-point data yielded a dislocation density of 0.61/b2; in good agreement with the density (0.66/b2) that was deduced from latent heats of fusion, where b was the length of the shortest perfect dislocation Burgers vector. It was concluded that melting corresponded to the situation in which, on average, half of the atoms were within dislocation cores.

Melting as a Dislocation-Mediated Phase Transition. L.Burakovsky, D.L.Preston, R.R.Silbar: Physical Review B, 2000, 61[22], 15011-8