Superconductivity in Al-Nb-Ti-V-Zr multicomponent alloy

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structural and superconducting properties of Al-Nb-Ti-V-Zr multicomponent alloys, revealing their superconductivity and similarities to known high-entropy alloys, with potential for next-generation superconducting wires.

Contribution

It provides a fundamental assessment of Al-Nb-Ti-V-Zr alloys, including Al5Nb24Ti40V5Zr26, demonstrating their superconductivity and structural characteristics.

Findings

All investigated alloys exhibit superconductivity.

Superconducting critical temperature depends on valence electron concentration.

Properties closely resemble those of typical bcc high-entropy alloys.

Abstract

The superconducting high-entropy alloys (HEAs) recently attract considerable attention due to their exciting properties, such as the robustness of superconductivity against atomic disorder and extremely high-pressure. The well-studied crystal structure of superconducting HEAs is body-centered-cubic (bcc) containing Nb, Ti, and Zr atoms. The same elements are contained in Al5Nb24Ti40V5Zr26, which is a recently discovered bcc HEA and shows a gum-metal-like behavior after cold rolling. The gum metal is also an interesting system, exhibiting superelasticity and low Young's modulus. If gum metals show superconductivity and can be used as a superconducting wire, the gum-metal HEA superconductors might be the next-generation superconducting wire materials. Aiming at a fundamental assessment of as-cast Al-Nb-Ti-V-Zr multicomponent alloys including Al5Nb24Ti40V5Zr26, we have investigated the structural and superconducting properties of the alloys. All alloys investigated show the superconductivity, and the valence electron concentration dependence of the superconducting critical temperature is very close to those of typical superconducting bcc HEAs.