  Chemical short-range order (CSRO) is believed to be a key contributor to the
exceptional properties of multicomponent alloys. However, direct validation and
confirmation of CSRO has been highly elusive in most compounds. Recent studies
for equiatomic NiCoCr alloys have shown that thermal treatments (i.e.,
annealing/aging) may facilitate and manipulate CSRO. In this work, by using
molecular simulations, we show that nanomechanical probes, such as
nanoindentation, may be utilized towards further manipulation of CSRO,
providing explicit validation pathways. By using well established interatomic
potentials, we perform hybrid Molecular-Dynamics/Monte-Carlo (MD/MC) at room
temperature to demonstrate that particular dwell nanoindentation protocols can
lead, through thermal MC equilibration, to the reorganization of CSRO under the
indenter tip, to a density-wave stripe pattern (DWO). We characterize the novel
DWO structures, that are directly correlated to incipient SRO but are highly
anisotropic and dependent on local, nanoindentation-induced stress
concentrations, and we show how they deeply originate from the peculiarities of
the interatomic potentials. Furthermore, we show that the DWO patterns
consistently scale up with the incipient plastic zone under the indenter tip,
justifying the observation of the DWO patterning at any experimentally feasible
nanoindentation depth.
