"When you design structural materials, you want them to be strong but also ductile and resistant to fracture," says metallurgist Easo George, Governor's Chair for Advanced Alloy Theory and Development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.George and fellow senior author, mechanical engineer Robert Richie of Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have spent some time working on a class of materials known as high-entropy alloys, or HEAs.To figure out how it works, the team used neutron diffraction, electron backscatter diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy to study CrCoNi down to the atomic level when fractured at room temperature and in extreme cold.There's nothing new about that, but it's the fact they all occur in this magical sequence that gives us these really tremendous properties."The next step will be to investigate the potential applications of such a material, as well as finding other HEAs with similar properties."