The Osaka team previously combined two different types of transition - metal disilicides to form a microscopic structure with alternating layers of
different alloy crystal.
Not exact matches
«If a particular
alloy composition exhibits many structurally
different, stable or metastable
crystal phases that have similar formation energies, these phases will compete against each other during solidification,» Vlassak said.
Alloys that meet these conditions solidify according to what's called the confusion principle: The widely differing atomic radii and the high number of
different elements «confuse» the atoms so they don't know where to go to form
crystals as they cool.
The researchers calculated the energies of common
crystal structures for a small library of binary
alloys — mixes of two
different metals — and then designed a machine - learning algorithm that could extract patterns from the library and guess the most likely ground state for a new
alloy.