Several metallic and semimetallic elements have been submitted to mech
anical milling to investigate their contamination with chrome-steel mi
lling tools. Contamination was followed with Fe-57 Mossbauer spectrosc
opy and X-ray diffraction. The contamination yield, defined as the num
ber of incorporated Fe moles per gram of sample, was found to be more
simply related to the Poisson ratio than to the Young, shear or bulk m
oduli, or to the enthalpy of mixing of the Fe-element couple.