Tuneable correlated disorder in alloys

Many desirable material properties may be associated with disorder exhibiting local periodicity or correlations. However, few systems allow systematic studies into the effects of intrinsic crystallographic conflict on correlated disorder. The authors use epitaxial matching to stabilize an exemplar system: pseudo-bcc U${}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}$Mo${}_{x}$ alloy, which exhibits a significant mismatch between basis preferred symmetry and global lattice. Employing diffuse inelastic x-ray scattering techniques 300-nm films, combined $a\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}b$ $i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}n\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}t\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o$ modeling, discover new form strong disorder-phonon coupling that dramatically suppresses phonon lifetimes. These findings have implications across broad range materials could exploited develop future functional materials.