More statistics on intermetallic compounds – ternary phases

How many different intermetallic compounds are known so far, and in how many different structure types do they crystallize? What are their chemical compositions, the most abundant ones and the rarest ones? These are some of the questions we are trying to find answers for in our statistical analysis of the structures of the 20 829 intermetallic phases included in the database Pearson's Crystal Data, with the goal of gaining insight into some of their ordering principles. In the present paper, we focus on the subset of 13 026 ternary intermetallics, which crystallize in 1391 different structure types; remarkably, 667 of them have just one representative. What makes these 667 structures so unique that they are not adopted by any other of the known intermetallic compounds? Notably, ternary compounds are known in only 5109 of the 85 320 theoretically possible ternary intermetallic systems so far. In order to get an overview of their chemical compositions we use structure maps with Mendeleev numbers as ordering parameters.