A Pressurized Exploration of Intermetallic Chemistry

Intermetallic phases have been known as a realm of “endless wonders”, whose expansion can be tracked first through the thick volumes of Pearson’s Handbook of Crystal Data on Intermetallic Phases of the 1990s to online crystal structure databases whose scale is measurable only in disk space. The structural data in these resources has shaped many of our views about the solid state. For example, we consider some elements such as bismuth and indium being relatively unreactive based on the large number of binary systems in which they show little interest in interacting with the second element. Along these lines, the Fe–Bi system combines elements that are essentially immiscible at atmospheric pressureso much so that melts of the two elements stubbornly segregate into separate liquid phases. Sometimes this nonreactivity is quite inconvenient: in this case, Fe–Bi compounds would be expected to display intriguing magnetic properties and could provide insights into the iron–pnictide family of superconductors.