  High traffic touch surfaces such as doorknobs, countertops, and handrails can
be transmission points for the spread of pathogens, emphasizing the need to
develop materials that actively self-sanitize. Metals are frequently used for
these surfaces due to their durability, but many metals also possess
antimicrobial properties which function through a variety of mechanisms. This
work investigates metallic alloys comprised of several bioactive metals with
the target of achieving broad-spectrum, rapid bioactivity through synergistic
activity. An entropy-motivated stabilization paradigm is proposed to prepare
scalable alloys of copper, silver, nickel and cobalt. Using combinatorial
sputtering, thin-film alloys were prepared on 100 mm wafers with 50%
compositional grading of each element across the wafer. The films were then
annealed and investigated for alloy stability. Bioactivity testing was
performed on both the as-grown alloys and the annealed films using four
microorganisms -- Phi6, MS2, Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli -- as
surrogates for human viral and bacterial pathogens. Testing showed that after
30 s of contact with some of the test alloys, Phi6, an enveloped,
single-stranded RNA bacteriophage that serves as a SARS-CoV 2 surrogate, was
reduced up to 6.9 orders of magnitude (>99.9999%). Additionally, the
non-enveloped, double-stranded DNA bacteriophage MS2, and the Gram-negative E.
coli and Gram-positive B. subtilis bacterial strains showed a 5.0, 6.4, and 5.7
log reduction in activity after 30, 20 and 10 minutes, respectively.
Bioactivity in the alloy samples showed a strong dependence on the composition,
with the log reduction scaling directly with the Cu content. Concentration of
Cu by phase separation after annealing improved activity in some of the
samples. The results motivate a variety of themes which can be leveraged to
design ideal bioactive surfaces.
