High-Entropy van der Waals Materials Formed from Mixed Metal Dichalcogenides, Halides, and Phosphorus Trisulfides

Seeking strength in diversity

30 August 2021

An essentially limitless range of two-dimensional materials with diverse physical properties could be generated by marrying two concepts in advanced materials design.

High-entropy alloys are novel materials made by combining multiple chemical elements in roughly equal proportions. This mixed-up makeup can confer high stability, strength, corrosion resistance and tunable electronic properties.

High-entropy alloys were discovered at around the same time as graphene, a high-performance example of a van der Waals material, which consist of weakly bonded stacked arrays of two-dimensional atomic sheets.

Combining these two material types to form two-dimensional sheets of high-entropy alloys can be used to generate a wide new range of materials, a team that included two ShanghaiTech University researchers has shown.

These materials showed superconductivity, enhanced magnetic properties, and high corrosion resistance, and may find use as long-lived catalysts.

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References

1. Journal of the American Chemical Society 143, 7042–7049 (2021). doi: 10.1021/jacs.1c01580