Nonequilibrium chemical short-range order in metallic alloys
arXiv:2409.15474 · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-64733-z
Abstract
Metallic alloys are routinely subjected to nonequilibrium processes during manufacturing, such as rapid solidification and thermomechanical processing. It has been suggested in the high-entropy alloy literature that chemical short-range order (SRO) could offer a new knob to tailor materials properties. While evidence of the effect of SRO on materials properties accumulates, the state of SRO evolution during alloy manufacturing remains obscure. Here, we employ high-fidelity atomistic simulations to track SRO evolution during the solidification and thermomechanical processing of alloys. Our investigation reveals that alloy processing can lead to nonequilibrium steady-states of SRO that are different from any equilibrium state. The mechanism behind nonequilibrium SRO formation is shown to be an inherent ordering bias present in nonequilibrium events. These results demonstrate that conventional manufacturing processes provide pathways for tuning SRO that lead to a broad nonequilibrium spectrum of SRO states beyond the equilibrium design space of alloys.
arXiv comment17 pages, 4 figures
References in corpus (11)
- Moment Tensor Potentials: a class of systematically improvable interatomic potentials
- Verification of Short-Range Order and Its Impact on the Properties of the CrCoNi Medium Entropy Alloy
- Robust Structural Identification via Polyhedral Template Matching
- Probing the ultimate limits of metal plasticity
- The origin of jerky dislocation motion in high-entropy alloys
- On a generalization of the Jensen-Shannon divergence
- Radiation-tolerant high-entropy alloys via interstitial-solute-induced chemical heterogeneities
- Maximum strength and dislocation patterning in multi-principal element alloys
- The Mechanism of the Ultra-Fast Crystal Growth of Pure Metals from their Melts
- Uncovering the effects of interface-induced ordering of liquid on crystal growth using machine learning
- Thermodynamic theory of dislocation-enabled plasticity