Procedure for measuring electrical resistivity of anisotropic materials: A revision of the Montgomery method

A procedure for determining the electrical resistivity of anisotropic materials is presented. It offers several improvements to the well-known Montgomery method. One improvement, in particular, is the ability to obtain the electrical resistivity for all three axes of an orthorhombic crystal analytically, rather than using the iterative approach suggested by Montgomery for the third axis. All necessary equations are derived and their application in determining the tensor components of the electrical resistivity is explained in detail. Measurements on isotropic specimens were executed in order to test the foundations of the method. Measurements on anisotropic samples are compared with measurements obtained by using the standard four-probe method, revealing good agreement. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3652905]