In this issue of the MRS Bulletin we present five papers that involve point defect phenomena in a wide variety of materials—metals, conducting ceramic oxides, semiconductors, amorphous alloys, and high Tc superconducting oxides. The unifying theme of this issue is point defects—zero-dimensional defects. Even for the high Tc oxides, where planar defects are discussed, it is the ordering of oxygen/vacancy chains that ultimately gives rise to twins in the famous YBa2Cu3O7.δ (1:2:3) oxide superconductor.

Hillard Huntington, professor emeritus of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an early and important pioneer in the study of point defects in metals. A theorist, he has also performed many experiments over the years; for example, he performed key early experiments on electromigration effects. Huntington's article presents a historical review of the research on vacancies and self-interstitial atoms in metals during the period that stretches from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. He played a crucial role in this field as a result of his seminal theoretical calculations, with Fred Seitz in 1942, on the enthalpies of formation and migration of vacancies or self-interstitial atoms in pure copper. Huntington's and Seitz's calculations indicated that diffusion occurs predominantly by a monovacancy mechanism since the enthalpy of formation of a self-interstitial atom, the [100] split form, also called the dumbbell form, is too large to be compatible with the activation enthalpy for self-diffusion in copper. It is now well established that the latter is given by the sum of the enthalpy of formation and the enthalpy of migration of a monovacancy in many face-centered-cubic (fcc), body-centered-cubic (bec), and hexagonal-close-packed (hcp) metals.