Emerging Hot Topics and Research Questions in Wrought Magnesium Alloy Development

Scientific understanding of the behavior of wrought magnesium alloys is quite mature, with literally thousands of papers published on the topic, along with several reviews. Most of this research is relatively recent, being published after the year 2000. With such a large body of work available to the reader, it could easily be missed that the field of magnesium metallurgy is poised for significant advances. Access to synchrotron and neutron scattering has revealed new knowledge about deformation and fracture behavior, and the complex interaction between solutes, dislocations, interfaces, and disconnections is only just becoming clear. Supercomputing now makes it possible to use atomic-scale simulation techniques to make material calculations such as stacking fault energy predictions, and the simulation of atom-by-atom movement at boundaries and twins in three dimensions is now feasible. Advanced microscopy techniques such as atom probe tomography are allowing us to examine the complex chemical nature of grain boundaries on the nanoscale. These are just some of the areas ripe with potential for new discovery. With so much information available to the reader, it can be difficult to identify those areas of study in which the greatest knowledge gaps exist or those which are most ripe for exploration. For this reason, several authors have teamed up to write this short discussion piece which highlights research areas which the authors agree have the most potential for impact in the field.