Complexity in Multicomponent High-Entropy Cantor Alloys (30/09/26)
Speaker and Affliation:
Prof. Brian Cantor
Department of Materials, University of Oxford;
and
Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology, Brunel University London
When?
30th September, 2026 (Wednesday), 11.00 AM (India Standard Time)
Where
KI Vasu Auditorium, Dept. of Materials Engineering, IISc, Bangalore
Abstract:
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, so we have lots of wonderful new materials yet to find. And multicomponent phase space contains a surprisingly large number of single-phase multicomponent solid solutions. The first group of these which was discovered are called Cantor alloys, an enormous composition range with a single-phase fcc 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, and the fundamentals of multicomponent solid solutions such as the Cantor alloys. The talk concentrates on the enormous complexity of local atomic and nanoscale configurations in such materials, the resulting difficulty in describing properties such as short-range ordering, atomic diffusion, dislocation slip, grain boundary structure, solidification and second-phase precipitation, and some of the implications for potential applications, at low and high temperatures, for corrosion and radiation resistance, and to enhance recycling and re-use.
Speaker Bio:
Brian Cantor is a Professor of Materials in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford and the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology (BCAST) at Brunel University London. He is also a chief editor of the new Springer-Nature journal High Entropy Alloys & Materials, a member of the Board of the Madrid-based research institute IMDEA Materials, and a LAM Fellow at the Liaoning Academy of Materials. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of York and Bradford, Head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Oxford, a research scientist and engineer at General Electric Research Labs in the USA, a consultant for Alcan, NASA and Rolls-Royce, a chief editor of Progress in Materials Science, and worked briefly at Banaras Hindu University, Washington State, Northeastern University, 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, the Wolfson Applied Health Research Centre, York’s $1b Heslington East campus, and the UN-supported International Centre of Excellence (ICE) in Circular Materials. He invented the new field of multicomponent high-entropy alloys and discovered the so-called Cantor alloys. He has been awarded many scientific prizes and honorary doctorates and professorships in the UK, USA, China, Australia, Mexico and India. In 1998 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) as “a world authority on materials and manufacturing”; in 2013 he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by the Queen for “services to higher education”; and in 2023 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).