Tunable Chemical Disorder in Concentrated Alloys: Defect Physics and Radiation Performance

The development of advanced structural alloys with performance meeting the requirements of extreme environments in nuclear reactors has been long pursued. In the long history of alloy development, the search for metallic alloys with improved radiation tolerance or increased structural strength has relied on either incorporating alloying elements at low concentrations to synthesize so-called dilute alloys or incorporating nanoscale features to mitigate defects. In contrast to traditional approaches, recent success in synthesizing multicomponent concentrated solid-solution alloys (CSAs), including medium-entropy and high-entropy alloys, has vastly expanded the compositional space for new alloy discovery. Their wide variety of elemental diversity enables tunable chemical disorder and sets CSAs apart from traditional dilute alloys. The tunable electronic structure critically lowers the effectiveness of energy dissipation via the electronic subsystem. The tunable chemical complexity also modifies the scattering mechanisms in the atomic subsystem that control energy transport through phonons. The level of chemical disorder depends substantively on the specific alloying elements, rather than the number of alloying elements, as the disorder does not monotonically increase with a higher number of alloying elements. To go beyond our knowledge based on conventional alloys and take advantage of property enhancement by tuning chemical disorder, this review highlights synergistic effects involving valence electrons and atomic-level and nanoscale inhomogeneity in CSAs composed of multiple transition metals. Understanding of the energy dissipation pathways, deformation tolerance, and structural stability of CSAs can proceed by exploiting the equilibrium and non-equilibrium defect processes at the electronic and atomic levels, with or without microstructural inhomogeneities at multiple length scales. Knowledge of tunable chemical disorder in CSAs may advance the understanding of the substantial modifications in element-specific alloy properties that effectively mitigate radiation damage and control a material's response in extreme environments, as well as overcome strength-ductility trade-offs and provide overarching design strategies for structural alloys.