Self-diffusion in liquid copper as seen by quasielastic neutron scattering

Quasielastic neutron scattering has been used to study atomic dynamics in liquid Cu. At small wave numbers $q$ the intermediate scattering function is dominated by incoherent scattering contributions. From the decay of the quasielastic signal, self-diffusion coefficients $D$ are obtained on an absolute scale. In a temperature range from 1370 to 1620 K, $D$ values exhibit an Arrhenius-type temperature dependence and are significantly smaller than those from previous tracer experiments that are hampered by convective flow.