English

Unavoidable disorder and entropy in multi-component systems

Materials Science 2019-06-05 v1

Abstract

The need for improved functionalities is driving the search for more complicated multi-component materials. Despite the factorially increasing composition space, ordered compounds with 4 or more species are rare. Here, we unveil the competition between the gain in enthalpy and entropy with increasing number of species by statistical analysis of the AFLOW data repositories. A threshold in the number of species is found where entropy gain exceeds enthalpy gain. Beyond that, enthalpy can be neglected, and disorder - complete or partial - is unavoidable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.01085,
  title  = {Unavoidable disorder and entropy in multi-component systems},
  author = {Cormac Toher and Corey Oses and David Hicks and Stefano Curtarolo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01085},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

2 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:40:01.470Z