Some Statistics on Intermetallic Compounds

It is still largely unknown why intermetallic phases show such a large variety of crystal structures, with unit cell sizes varying between 1 and more than 20 000 atoms. The goal of our study was, therefore, to get a general overview of the symmetries, unit cell sizes, stoichiometries, most frequent structure types, and their stability fields based on the Mendeleev numbers as ordering parameters. A total of 20829 structures crystallizing in 2166 structure types have been studied for this purpose. Thereby, the focus was on a subset of 6441 binary intermetallic compounds, which crystallize in 943 structure types.