An Exploration into the Stability of A15 Alloys​.*

Medium entropy alloys (MEAs) are a class of materials consisting of three to five elements in near equimolar proportions, leading to a higher entropy of mixing. Additionally, some MEAs and alloys of higher entropy have demonstrated improved and desirable properties, as compared to their individual components - such as hardness, corrosion resistance, and even elevated superconducting transition temperatures. Currently, MEAs are being explored for many applications, and many are attempting to understand the reasoning behind why certain MEAs form and why properties are sometimes enhanced in the MEA. One structure that has been recently investigated is the A15 structure due to its historical significance in the science of superconductivity. Our research goal is to compute and analyze stable ternary alloys in the A15 structure to discover the effect of alloying on the properties of the material, with hopes of eventually finding a stable, higher entropy alloy, such as an MEA, to explore its properties. This research includes using a combination of quantum mechanical first principles calculations and software that constructs alloys of random compositions of the constituent elements and to find the stability of the configurations.