Spiers Memorial Lecture: Multicomponent and high-entropy materials: an overview

Multicomponent phase space is enormous and contains a vast number of complex new materials. Despite intensive investigation in the last decade and a half however, we are only slowly making progress towards understanding these new materials. This paper attempts to summarise some of the fundamental discoveries we have made about the geography of multicomponent phase space and the wide range of complex new materials that we have found within it. This paper discusses briefly the following topics: the size and shape of multicomponent phase space and the range of single- and multiple-phase fields that it contains; the (initially) surprising presence of many large near-ideal single-phase solid-solution phases, stabilised by a high configurational entropy of mixing; the extensive and wide-ranging variation of local nanostructure and associated mechanical and electronic lattice strain that permeates throughout high-entropy solid-solution phases; and some of the unusual, exciting and valuable properties that are then produced within multicomponent and high-entropy materials. Many of the results discussed have been obtained from the fcc Cantor alloys (based on the original Cantor alloy, equiatomic fcc CrMnFeCoNi) and the bcc Senkov alloys (based on the original Senkov alloy, equiatomic VNbMoTaW), two groups of multicomponent high-entropy single-phase materials that have been particularly widely studied. Similar behaviour is also found in other multicomponent high-entropy single-phase materials, though these have not been studied so intensively. In comparison with multicomponent high-entropy single-phase materials, rather little is known about multicomponent multiphase materials that have also not been studied so intensively.