Editorial: Modeling of structural and chemical disorders: From metallic glasses to high entropy alloys

Modeling of Structural and Chemical Disorders: From Metallic Glasses to High Entropy AlloysComplex materials such as metallic glasses (MGs) and high-entropy alloys (HEAs) have received considerable attention over the past few decades (Ma and Wu., 2019;Qiao et al., 2019), because: 1) their inherently disordered local structures and chemistries provide a rich variety of environments as the ideal playgrounds and testbeds to examine the most fundamental questions in materials science, namely the structure-property relationship; and, 2) the metastability nature has endowed them with great potentials for properties control and subsequently numerous engineering applications.While tremendous progresses have been made in the field, formidable challenges still exist that have hindered a predictive and fundamental knowledge on the mechanical and physical behaviors in MGs and HEAs.In particular, the challenges mainly come from two aspects: First, effective and robust structure-property relations are very difficult to be built in these materials with strong structural and chemical disorders; Second, as nonequilibrium systems, MGs' and HEAs' structures and properties are dynamically evolving, subjected to the processing histories and operational conditions.In recent years new concepts and algorithms-including short/medium range orders, i.e., SROs/ MROs (Ding et al., 2018;Xing et al., 2022), energy landscape quantifications (Fan et al., 2014b;Cao et al., 2019;Liu and Fan., 2021), structural heterogeneities (Fan et al., 2014a;Ding et al., 2014), atomic-level stresses fluctuations (Iwashita et al., 2013), etc-have been proposed and shown promising progresses.Within such a context, we present a salient Research Topic of research papers in this Research Topic, which shows some novel and important results in the field.