Carbon atoms play an important role in the strength of steel. However, even in steels that have been in use for decades, the collective behavior of these atoms was not fully understood until now.
Joint work at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research (MPIE) has shed light on this: the interplay between the carbon atoms, the distortions they cause in the crystal lattice and the lattice structure defects in steel is decisive for the energetic preferences of the individual carbon atoms.
The work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant number HI 1300/15-1, as part of the DFG-ANR project C-TRAM. Original publication: Xie Zhang, Hongcai Wang, Tilmann Hickel, Jutta Rogal, Yujiao Li, Jörg Neugebauer: Mechanism of collective interstitial ordering in Fe-C alloys, in: Nature Materials, 2020, DOI: 10.1038/s41563-020-0677-9, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-020-0677-9
