All superconducting cuprates are inherently disordered because charge doping is required to generate both hole- and electron-doped superconducting states. Other forms of disorder have been shown to have complex relationships with cuprate superconductivity, depending on both composition and disorder type. Configurational entropy offers a promising, largely unexplored avenue for understanding the effects of disorder on superconductivity. It has recently attracted the attention of materials scientists following the discovery of high-entropy materials (HEMs). HEMs are an extension of conventional crystalline materials. While each atomic site in conventional materials is occupied by a single element, in HEMs there is a random distribution of 5 or more elements at the same site throughout the entire crystal.

We investigated the effects of increasing configurational entropy on the charge order (CO) phenomenon exhibited in electron-doped cuprates. This phenomenon is strongly coupled to the superconducting state, and studying its correlation with a strong perturbation, such as configurational entropy, could provide further insights into its microscopic behavior. We synthesized low-, medium-, and high-entropy analogs of electron-doped cuprates by controlling the number of rare earths in the charge reservoir layer. Then, we performed soft resonant elastic X-ray scattering at the Cu L3 edge to characterize the CO order peak.