{"id":223132,"date":"2025-10-09T03:20:43","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T08:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/researchers-discover-a-hidden-atomic-order-that-persists-in-metals-even-after-extreme-processing"},"modified":"2025-10-09T03:20:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T08:20:43","slug":"researchers-discover-a-hidden-atomic-order-that-persists-in-metals-even-after-extreme-processing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/researchers-discover-a-hidden-atomic-order-that-persists-in-metals-even-after-extreme-processing","title":{"rendered":"Researchers discover a hidden atomic order that persists in metals even after extreme processing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-discover-a-hidden-atomic-order-that-persists-in-metals-even-after-extreme-processing.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For decades, it\u2019s been known that subtle chemical patterns exist in metal alloys, but researchers thought they were too minor to matter\u2014or that they got erased during manufacturing. However, recent studies have shown that in laboratory settings, these patterns can change a metal\u2019s properties, including its mechanical strength, durability, heat capacity, radiation tolerance, and more.<\/p>\n<p>Now, researchers at MIT have found that these chemical patterns also exist in conventionally manufactured metals. The surprising finding revealed a new physical phenomenon that explains the persistent patterns.<\/p>\n<p>In a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-025-64733-z\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Communications<\/i> today, the researchers describe how they tracked the patterns and discovered the physics that explains them. The authors also developed a simple model to predict chemical patterns in metals, and they show how engineers could use the model to tune the effect of such patterns on metallic properties, for use in aerospace, semiconductors, nuclear reactors, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For decades, it\u2019s been known that subtle chemical patterns exist in metal alloys, but researchers thought they were too minor to matter\u2014or that they got erased during manufacturing. However, recent studies have shown that in laboratory settings, these patterns can change a metal\u2019s properties, including its mechanical strength, durability, heat capacity, radiation tolerance, and more. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,873,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-nuclear-energy","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}