“…There is extensive evidence of intermetallic compound formation in liquid metal solutions (Wilson, 1965;Steeb and Entress, 1966;Steeb and Hezel, 1966;Bhatia and Thornton, 1970;Bhatia et al, 1974a,b;Shimoji, 1978;Jordan, 1979;Predel, 1979;Chieux and Ruppersberg, 1980;Stoicos, 1980;Sornrner, 1982b), and "chemical" solution theories acknowledging such behavior have been quite successful in modeling liquid alloy properties (Hildebrand and Eastman, 191 5 ;Jordan, 1970Jordan, , 1976Bhatia et al, 1974a,b;Bhatia and Ratti, 1977;Predel and Oehme, 1976;Eckert et al, 1982;Sommer, 1982a,b;Alger and Eckert, 1983). We postulate that similar compound formation occurs in the surface phase, and an example substantiating such a phenomenon is shown in Figure 1, where a minimum in surface tension occurs at the same composition as the very strong intermetallic compound Zn,Mg.…”