Intermetallics: New physics

Intermetallic compounds, or 'intermetallics' for short, have received extensive attention in recent years because of their technological promise as high-temperature structural materials. This technical research has been accompanied by a programme of curiosity-driven research which has uncovered a number of novel physical features, beginning with a major burst of research on vacant lattice sites in certain intermetallics, and continuing with such phenomena as dislocation injection across phase boundaries, structural aspects of Laves phases and the use of an intermetallic to separate hydrogen isotopes. Some of these recent developments are surveyed here.