Identification of complex intermetallic phases using single crystal diffuse scattering.

Complex metallic alloys are fascinating materials, which despite seemingly simple chemical composition show surprisingly complex structures containing hundreds and thousand atoms per unit cell. Finding such phases is complicated due to the fact that they appear at low temperatures where diffusion is slow, and thus even when the temperature of their formation is known apriori their synthesis sometimes requires months of annealing. In this work we propose single crystal x-ray diffuse scattering as a probe for the discovery of complex intermetallic phases. Diffuse scattering allows to capture such complex phases in the early stages, when they manifest only as weak local ordering. As a result, it diffuse scattering efficiently guide synthesis by suggesting the phase regions and temperature ranges where ordering will likely take place. We will test the applicability of this method on Cd1-xAux near x=1/4, which is known to have a number of long-range modulated phases.