Cooperative Atomic Displacements and Melting at the Limit of Superheating

This paper shows how the melting of superheated crystals originates from the localization of thermal disorder in excited regions of the crystalline structure. Within such regions, disordered thermal motion is found to induce the formation of bulk topological defects. These consist of atoms with a number of nearest neighbors different from the equilibrium one. Such defectively coordinated atoms arrange according to pseudolinear clusters, the number and size of which depend on temperature. Characterized by high mobility, defective atoms and their nearest neighbors are seen to undergo a cooperative dynamics that can result in net atom displacements between equilibrium lattice sites.