@article{Sun2026, 
author = {Hao Sun and Jianan Xu and Xuemei Jia and Hanao Deng and Jia Chen and Congwei Xie and Wenyuan Li and Yafei Liu and Ruifeng Wu and Aimin Chang and Bo Zhang},
title = {Homogenizing energy landscapes and microstructure enabling linear and stable thermal sensing response in high-entropy niobates},
year = {2026},
journal = {Journal of Advanced Ceramics},
keywords = {high-entropy ceramics, thermosensitive ceramics, thermal stability, lattice distortion, self-healing densification, aging drift, niobate},
url = {https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/JAC.2026.9221348},
doi = {10.26599/JAC.2026.9221348},
abstract = {Advanced temperature-sensitive materials play an increasingly important role in modern hypersonic propulsion technology. For such applications, ensuring long-term high-temperature (above 1000 °C) stability is key to enabling integrated structural and functional capabilities. Herein, we develop a Mo-regulated high-entropy ferroelastic niobate strategy for ultrawide-temperature negative-temperature-coefficient thermosensitive ceramics. Density functional theory calculations show that the A-site high-entropy facilitates Mo doping in (Ca0.2La0.2Ce0.2Eu0.2Gd0.2)NbO4. Consequently, Mo doping broadens the distribution of local atomic configurations, modulates ferroelastic domain structures, and increases atomic-scale displacement disorder. These structural changes redistribute Hall transport contributions and reduce the mismatch between grain and grain-boundary transport barriers. As a result, the developed ceramics exhibit highly linear Arrhenius behavior (R2 = 0.99907) over an ultrawide temperature range from -50 to 1250 °C, accompanied by a low B-value fluctuation of only 4.44%. High-temperature impedance analysis further confirms closely matched grain and grain-boundary activation energies, with a minimum activation-energy mismatch of only  ≈ 0.009 eV. During aging at 1250 °C, the ceramics exhibit aging-induced post-densification accompanied by increase in relative density and strain redistribution, resulting in excellent long-term stability with a stabilized-stage resistance drift as low as 1.09% after 1000 h. These findings demonstrate that manipulating entropy-stabilized defects provides a robust pathway to decouple sensitivity from degradation in functional ceramics under thermal stress.}
}