The role of ALCHEMI in understanding the properties of ordered intermetallic alloys

After one and one-half decades of development, ALCHEMI is approaching the status of an established analytical technique. Many of the problems that have plagued ALCHEMI, especially for the analysis of ordered intermetallic alloys, are now well understood, and accurate site-distributions can be extracted from a variety of intermetallic alloys. This paper begins with an overview of the factors that can lead to large systematic errors or gross misinterpretations of ALCHEMI data, with illustrations from a variety of ordered intermetallic alloys. The paper concludes with a discussion of ALCHEMI in the broader context of understanding the properties of ordered intermetallic alloys. The results of systematic studies are used to illustrate the role of ALCHEMI in determining the competing effects of thermodynamic and kinetic factors during alloy processing and the correlation of alloy properties with the atomic site distributions on which the properties ultimately depend