INTERFACE SCIENCE 10, 303–309, 2002 c  2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Grain Boundary Wetting Statistic in Zn/Ga System and its Application to Grain Boundary Energy Spectrum Estimation P. VOLOVITCH Laboratoire M´ ecaSurf, ´ Ecole Nationale Sup´ erieure des Arts et M´ etiers, F-13617 Aix en Provence, France V. TRASKINE Chemical Department, Moscow State University, Vorobievy Gory, 119899 Moscow, Russia T. BAUDIN Laboratoire de physico-chimie de l’´ etat solide, UMR CNRS 8648, Universit´ e de Paris Sud, bˆ atiment 410, 91405 Orsay, France L. BARRALLIER Laboratoire M´ ecaSurf, ´ Ecole Nationale Sup´ erieure des Arts et M´ etiers, F-13617 Aix en Provence, France Abstract. The grain boundary statistic in zinc polycrystals in contact with saturated Ga(Zn) melt has been stud- ied. The misorientation angle distributions for zinc thin foil and zinc plates were obtained. The influence of the misorientation angle θ value on the wetting probability p of grain boundaries was observed. The grain boundary energy distribution parameters were obtained by using the p(θ ) relationship. The dihedral angles in triple lines of non-wetted zinc samples were also measured and their distribution was used to obtain the grain boundary energy distribution function. The parameters obtained by two different methods correspond to one other. Keywords: grain boundary wetting, zinc, gallium, grain boundary energy distribution, electron backscattered diffraction 1. Introduction The variation of grain boundary (GB) properties in the same material, particularly grain groove geometry and wetting behavior, have recently attracted an increasing amount of attention [1–4]. The well-known Herring rule [5] is used to extract GB free energy σ GB from triple line geometry and grain orientation data [3, 4]. These studies show that if the relative grain boundary energy is correlated to the misorientation across the boundary, small misorientation boundaries are appar- ent to have relatively lower energies. At larger misori- entations, it appears that the grain boundary to surface energy ratio is influenced by the anisotropy of the sur- face energy and/or grain boundary tangent plane. This method requires a large number of experiments to an- alyze in detail hundreds and thousands of triple lines. To describe a material it is often not necessary to have detailed information about each GB energy, only GB energy distribution function. The GB energy distribu- tion can be determined from statistical material charac- teristics available from less complicated experiments. One possibility is to calculate GB energy distribution parameters from data on dihedral angles in triple line distribution [6]. This method is also based on the Her- ring equation excluding the torque term, which is im- portant for special boundaries. Hence, this assumption is valid only for random boundaries. The final equa- tion connecting dihedral angles α i and relative energies σ GB i of opposite grain boundaries for each triple line