Topic:
Scientific Achievement
By correlating electron microscopy and atom probe tomography (APT) with simulations, researchers revealed irradiation-induced chemical segregation and laid the foundation for APT nanovoid imaging.
Significance and Impact
Characterization with unprecedented accuracy of chemical composition is now possible near nanovoids, which are a major reason for nuclear materials degradation
Research Details
- Correlative electron microscopy and APT experiments demonstrate that nanoscale voids can lead to significant local aberrations in APT reconstructions
- Cross-validations between experiments and simulations reveal that these aberrations result from differences in both the void shape and the evaporation fields of materials near the voids
- APT is used to directly measure element concentrations around voids in irradiated next generation alloys with chemical sensitivities as low as 10 parts per million.
X. Wang et al., Interpreting nano-voids in atom probe tomography for accurate local composition measurements, Nature Communications 11, 1022 (2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14832-w
