Metals and alloys articles from across Nature Portfolio

How the random solid solution (RSS) alloys accommodate plasticity and overcome strength-ductility trade-off remain unresolved. Here, the authors reveal atomic-scale plastic deformation of AuCu alloy, which shed light on the effect of chemical inhomogeneity on plastic deformation of RSS alloys.

Electrocatalytic conversion of low-cost organic compounds to high-value chemicals urgently demands the development of efficient electrocatalysts. Mao et al. report the synthesis of Cu single-atom dispersed Rh metallene arrays for electrochemical aniline synthesis and biomass upgrading with enhanced electrocatalytic activity.

We evaluated the liquid fragility and structural and dynamic heterogeneity of glassy solids. The most fragile alloy exhibited the maximum dynamic heterogeneity in the mechanical unfreezing process. We observed that atomic displacement significantly correlated with degrees of clustering of local atomic orders. The clustering produced during the glass-forming quenching process enhanced structural and dynamic heterogeneities. Therefore, there are correlations among liquid fragility, dynamic heterogeneity in liquid alloys, and dynamic and structural heterogeneities in glassy solids. In addition, the alloy with the most fragility exhibited the largest difference in atomic mobility between the densely and loosely packed local atomic orders.

The near-zero thermal expansion of Invar alloy Fe₆₅Ni₃₅ is technologically important but still unexplained. Measurements show that this phenomenon can be explained by the cancellation of magnetic and phonon contributions to the alloy’s entropy.

In many concentrated alloys of current interest, the observation of diffuse superlattice intensities by transmission electron microscopy has been attributed to chemical short-range order. We briefly review these findings and comment on the plausibility of widespread interpretations, noting the absence of expected peaks, conflicts with theoretical predictions, and the possibility of alternative explanations.

The direct observation of enhanced dislocation mobility in iron by in situ electron microscopy offers key insights and adds to the ongoing debate on the mechanisms of hydrogen embrittlement.

An article in Nature reports an alloy that can be 3D printed and has improved mechanical properties at high temperatures compared with current state-of-the-art 3D-printable alloys.

Materials design has largely expanded to multiple compositions, which requires the mixing of an increasing number of elements. In this joint Focus issue with Nature Materials, we take a closer look at the role of computational methods for guiding exploration within such vast chemical spaces.

Dr Valentino Cooper, a Distinguished R&D Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, talks to Nature Computational Science about his research on density functional theory and on designing high-entropy materials and piezoelectrics.