Probing the Magnetism of Medium and High Entropy Alloys

技术进步和文明的新时期与新材料密不可分，新材料由于其所表现出的上级特性而开辟了新的可能性。高熵合金是最近发现的一类材料。这些是电子复杂的材料，因为高度的无序，由此晶体结构仍然基于面心立方结构，但每个晶格点被具有相等概率的典型五种不同元素中的一种随机占据。这种无序对电子性质（包括磁性）有很大的影响，未来的开发需要详细了解它们的电子行为方式和原子尺度下的磁性性质。目前，在原子尺度上对它们的磁序的了解几乎完全来自计算机模拟而不是实验，基本思想还没有经过实验检验。我们的目标是通过使用同步加速器的光探测它们的磁性来纠正这一点。通过这样做，我们希望能够为未来的技术开发奠定坚实的基础。

Technological advances and indeed new periods of civilisation are inextricably linked to new materials which open up new possibilities because of the superior properties they exhibit. High-entropy alloys are a recently discovered class of materials. These are electronically complex materials because of the high degree of disorder whereby the crystal structure is still based on a face-centred cubic structure but each lattice point is randomly occupied by one of typically five different elements with equal probability. This disorder has a large impact on the electronic properties (including magnetism) and a future exploitation demands a detailed understanding of way their electrons behave and the nature of the magnetism at an atomic scale. At the moment, insight into their magnetic order at the atomic scale has come almost entirely from computer simulations rather than experiment, and basic ideas have not been experimentally tested. We aim to rectify this by probing their magnetism using light from a synchrotron. By doing this, it is hoped that we will be able to establish a firm basis for future technological exploitation.