High-Entropy Materials and Their Properties

High-entropy materials represent a paradigm shift in materials design, comprising equimolar or near-equimolar combinations of five or more principal elements. The resulting high configurational entropy stabilises homogeneous single-phase solid solutions that frequently defy conventional phase-diagram expectations. This configurational stabilisation enables extraordinary control over mechanical, thermal and functional properties, delivering ultrahigh-temperature stability in non-oxide ceramics, exceptional hardness and oxidation resistance in refractory diborides and carbides, enhanced electrochemical cycling stability in multicomponent oxides, and novel magnetic and catalytic behaviours. Advances in computational descriptors, high-throughput synthesis and multiscale characterisation have accelerated the discovery of new high-entropy phases, allowing tailored design for applications in aerospace ultra-high-temperature components, energy storage electrodes, single-atom catalysts and thermoelectric devices. By accommodating extensive chemical disorder and diverse bonding environments, high-entropy materials offer unprecedented compositional freedom to address pressing global challenges in energy, transport and catalysis.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have introduced a disordered enthalpy–entropy descriptor that quantifies the trade-off between configurational disorder and enthalpic cost, dramatically reducing computational effort and reliably predicting the synthesizability of multicomponent ceramics across diverse chemistries and structures. This descriptor has guided the experimental discovery of new single-phase high-entropy carbonitrides and borides. Foundational investigations of entropy-stabilised oxides have demonstrated reversible solid-state transformations between multiphase and single-phase states, confirming that high configurational entropy can dominate the thermodynamic landscape and yield homogeneous cation distributions with emergent phononic and electronic properties. Complementary work on high-entropy oxides for reversible energy storage has revealed that entropy stabilisation enhances lithium-ion capacity retention and cycling stability, and that electrochemical performance can be tuned simply by varying the elemental composition within the multicomponent lattice.

High-Entropy Materials and Their Properties publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in high-entropy materials and their properties across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

High-entropy material: a multi-component system comprising five or more principal elements in (approximate) equimolar ratios, stabilised by large configurational entropy.

Configurational entropy: the thermodynamic measure of disorder associated with the distribution of multiple species across a crystallographic sublattice.

Single-phase solid solution: a homogeneous crystalline phase in which diverse elements substitute randomly on equivalent lattice sites without forming secondary phases.

Disordered enthalpy–entropy descriptor: a computational metric capturing the balance between enthalpic penalties and entropy gains to predict the synthesizability of high-entropy phases.

Spark plasma sintering: a rapid powder consolidation technique employing pulsed electric currents to achieve densification at lower temperatures and shorter times than conventional sintering.

References

1. Disordered enthalpy–entropy descriptor for high-entropy ceramics discovery. Nature (2024).
2. High-Entropy Metal Diborides: A New Class of High-Entropy Materials and a New Type of Ultrahigh Temperature Ceramics. Scientific Reports (2016).
3. High entropy oxides for reversible energy storage. Nature Communications (2018).
4. Entropy-stabilized oxides. Nature Communications (2015).
5. Processing and Properties of High-Entropy Ultra-High Temperature Carbides. Scientific Reports (2018).
6. High-entropy ceramics: Present status, challenges, and a look forward. Journal of Advanced Ceramics (2021).
7. Data-Driven Design of Ecofriendly Thermoelectric High-Entropy Sulfides. Inorganic Chemistry (2018).
8. A high entropy silicide by reactive spark plasma sintering. Journal of Advanced Ceramics (2019).
9. Entropy-stabilized single-atom Pd catalysts via high-entropy fluorite oxide supports. Nature Communications (2020).