Dissolution of carbon-vacancy complexes in Fe-C alloys

The properties of carbon-vacancy clusters were studied on the basis of mechanical relaxation experiments in Fe-C alloys with a variety of carbon concentrations, providing at the same time the conditions for vacancies to be out of equilibrium. The observed relaxation peaks were assigned to the dissolution of different carbon-vacancy clusters, according to their activation energies and relaxation strengths, which are found to be in the correct energy range according to density functional calculations available from the literature.