High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are promising materials for catalysis and energy storage, and at the same time they are extremely hard, heat resistant and demonstrate great variability in their magnetic behaviour. Now, a team at BESSY II in collaboration with Ruhr University Bochum, BAM, Freie Universität Berlin and University of Latvia has gained new insights into the local environment of a so-called high-entropy Cantor alloy made of chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt and nickel, and has thus also been able to partially explain the magnetic properties of a nanocrystalline film of this alloy.
High entropy alloys or HEAs consist of five or more different metallic elements and are an extremely interesting class of materials with a great diversity of potential applications. Since their macroscopic properties are strongly dependent on interatomic interactions, it is utterly interesting to probe the local structure and structural disorder around each individual element by element-specific techniques. Now, a team has examined a so called Cantor alloy – a model system to study the high-entropy effects on the local and macroscopic scales.
Read more on the HZB website
Image: The Cantor alloy under study consists of chromium (grey), manganese (pink), iron (red), cobalt (blue), and nickel (green). X-ray methods allow to probe each individual component in an element-specific way.
Credit: © A. Kuzmin/University of Latvia and A. Smekhova/HZB
