Accurate prediction of short-range order and its effect on thermodynamic, structural, and electronic properties of disordered alloys: exemplified in archetypical Cu 3 Au
Electronic-structure methods based on density-functional theory (DFT) were used to quantify the effect of chemical short-range order (SRO) on thermodynamic, structural, and electronic properties of archetypal face-centered-cubic (fcc) Cu3Au alloy. We showed that SRO can be tuned to alter bonding and lattice dynamics (i.e., phonons) and detail how these properties are changed with SRO. Thermodynamically favorable SRO significantly improved the phase stability of fcc Cu3Au from -0.0343 eV-atom -1 to –0.0682 eV-atom -1 . We used our DFT-based linear-response theory to predict SRO and its electronic origin, and accurately estimate the observed transition temperature, ordering instability (L1 2 ), and Warren-Cowley SRO parameters, in agreement with experiments. The accurate prediction of real-space SRO gives an edge over computationally and resource intensive approaches such as monte-carlo methods or experiments, which will enable large scale molecular dynamic simulations by providing supercells with optimized SRO. Here we also analyzed phonon dispersion and estimated the vibrational entropy change (from 9kB at 300 K to 6kB at 100 K) in fcc Cu3Au. We established from SRO analysis that exclusion of chemical interactions may lead to a skewed view of true properties in chemically complex alloys. The first-principles methods described in this work are generally applicable to any arbitrary solid-solution alloys, including multi-principal-element alloys, therefore, holds promise for designing technologically useful materials.