Kinetically driven ordering in phase separating alloys

Abstract

It is shown that in substitutional alloys, peculiar ordered patterns can result from neighborhood-dependent diffusion activation barriers even when there are no metastable ordered phases. Lattice gases with pure phase separation character are shown to exhibit transient ordered structures that can be retained almost indefinitely, although these structures are not at thermodynamic equilibrium. It is shown that such structures can come about relatively easily by quenching from the high-temperature configurationally random solid solution.