What aspect do you consider basic? I haven’t had a chance to read more than the abstract because of the paywall, but the really interesting thing here is the mechanically induced transformation that leads to a 3-phase nanocrystalline alloy. I haven’t understood the “fully coherent” part from just the abstract, but I think it’s a very novel report. It means they have three different crystal structures with seamless interfaces because all the atoms line up at where the crystals meet. To do that with three structures is remarkable. I’m not sure if it’s the first example, but I’m only aware of alloys with two coherent phases (some superalloys for example)
There’s some precedent for mechanical deformation to get nanocrystalline grain structure, and some precedent for mechanically induced phase transformations (see TrIP steels) but I consider both of those concepts pretty advanced
TrIP is probably the closest thing, but I’m not sure how widely known there are among the “metal forging” community? TrIP is usually targeting well known phase transformations to two-phase microstructures, here we have three nanostructured phases.
Finally high entropy alloys are absolutely not well understood, even if the idea of mixing a lot of elements and getting a disordered solution seems simple on its face.
TrIP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIP_steel