Quasilocalized modes in crystalline and partially crystalline high-entropy alloys

Abstract

High entropy alloys (HEAs) are designed by mixing multiple metallic species in nearly the same amount to obtain crystalline or amorphous materials with exceptional mechanical properties. Here we use molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the role of positional and compositional disorder in determining the low-frequency vibrational properties of CrMnFeCoNi HEAs with a varying degree of amorphous order. Our results show that the expected dependence of the density of states on the frequency as D(ω)∼ω4 is recovered for amorphous HEAs and is also observed for partially crystallized alloys with deviations that depend on the degree of crystallization. We find that the quasilocalized vibrations are still visible in crystalline HEAs, albeit suppressed compared to the corresponding amorphous alloys. Our work offers a unified perspective to describe HEA mechanical properties in terms of their vibrational density of states.