Use of a hand‐held computer to calculate Debye temperatures of cubic crystals from elastic constants

A hand‐held computer that can be easily carried in a pocket was programmed in BASIC to do a numerical integration over 1/16 of a unit sphere in order to calculate the Debye temperatures of cubic crystals from elastic constant data. The computer program was designed to solve a third‐order equation involving the elastic constants so the velocity of acoustic waves in many different directions in the crystal could be determined and the information used to evaluate the average velocity integral. The results obtained for the elastic Debye temperatures agree with previous values calculated with programs running on large mainframe computers.