Atomic-scale pathway of early-stage precipitation in Al–Mg–Si alloys

Strengthening in age-hardenable alloys is mainly achieved through nano-scale precipitates whose formation paths from the atomic-scale, solute-enriched entities are rarely analyzed and understood in a directly verifiable way. Here, we discover a pathway for the earliest-stage precipitation in Al–Mg–Si alloys: solute clustering leading to three successive variants of face-centered cubic (fcc) clusters, followed by the formation of non-fcc …