High-pressure synthesis is a powerful tool for the discovery of new phases, and can be used to uncover new metastable phases even within well-explored systems. The vanadium-carbon system is one of the most well-studied binary systems due to its importance in steels as well as for its many high-resilience compounds used across industry. We present in situ x-ray diffraction data collected during synthesis experiments carried out between 1. 0 and 5. 1 GPa in the V-C system at 25 at. % carbon, and we report the synthesis and recovery of a novel metastable body-centered tetragonal carbide, ε - VC y ' ' -VCₘ^.
Cote et al. (Thu,) studied this question.