Disorder drives synthesizability of multi-component systems*

The factorial increase in the number of potential compositions with increasing number of elemental components is not reflected in the number of synthesized ordered chemical compounds [1]. We show that this is due to formation-entropy-gain exceeding formation-enthalpy-gain as more species are added to the mixture. An analysis of the dependence of formation enthalpy on the number of species [2] using data extracted from the AFLOW data repository [3] shows interesting trends about the interplay between entropic and enthalpic effects on the synthesizability of multi-component materials.
[1] M. Widom, J. Stat. Phys. 167, 726–734 (2017).
[2] C. Oses et al., J. Chem. Inf. Model., in press, doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.8b00393 (2018).
[3] S. Curtarolo et al., Comput. Mater. Sci. 58, 227–235 (2012).