Multicomponent High-Entropy Cantor Alloys

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• Prof Brian Cantor
• Tuesday 28 January 2025, 18:00-19:30
• Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Zhang Xianghao Jeffrey.

All human advances have depended on making new materials, and all materials are alloys, i.e. mixtures of several different starting materials or components. So the history of the human race has been the continued invention of new materials by discovering new alloys. Recently a new way of doing this, by manufacturing multicomponent high-entropy alloys, has shown that the total number of possible materials is enormous, even more than the number of atoms in the galaxy. The vast majority of these new materials have never been thought of, let alone made, so we have lots of wonderful new materials yet to find. The first group of these new materials that was discovered are called Cantor alloys, an enormous range of millions of materials all with an incredibly simple face-centred cubic structure, based loosely on the original equiatomic five-component Cantor alloy CrMnFeCoNi. This talk will discuss briefly the previous history of alloying, the discovery of multicomponent alloys, the structure of multicomponent phase space, the complexity of local atomic and nanoscale configurations in such materials, the effect of this on some fundamental properties such as electronic and atomic motion (conductivity and diffusivity), and the resulting outstanding properties and potential applications, including at low and high temperatures, for corrosion and radiation resistance, and to enhance recycling and re-use.

Brian Cantor is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, a Research Professor in the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology at Brunel University, a Trustee of the UK’s National Science Museum Group, Co-Director of the UKRI Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Circular Metals, and a Chief Editor of the Springer-Nature research journal High Entropy Alloys and Materials. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of York and Bradford University, Head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Oxford, and a research scientist and engineer at General Electric Research Labs in the USA ; he also worked briefly at Banaras Hindu University, Washington State, Northeastern, IISc Bangalore and the Kobe Institute. He founded and built up the World Technology Universities Network, the UK National Science Learning Centre, the Hull-York Medical School, Oxford’s Begbroke Science Park, and the York Heslington East campus. He was a long-standing consultant for Alcan, NASA and Rolls-Royce, and editor of Progress in Materials Science. He invented the new field of multicomponent high-entropy alloys and discovered the so-called Cantor alloys. Among many honours and prizes from different countries around the world, he is a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).

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