TY - JOUR
T1 - Interpreting nanovoids in atom probe tomography data for accurate local compositional measurements
AU - Wang, Xing
AU - Hatzoglou, Constantinos
AU - Sneed, Brian
AU - Fan, Zhe
AU - Guo, Wei
AU - Jin, Ke
AU - Chen, Di
AU - Bei, Hongbin
AU - Wang, Yongqiang
AU - Weber, William J.
AU - Zhang, Yanwen
AU - Gault, Baptiste
AU - More, Karren L.
AU - Vurpillot, Francois
AU - Poplawsky, Jonathan D.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution (EDDE) Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under contract number DE-AC05-00OR22725. Electron microscopy and APT were conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), which is a US DOE Office of Science User Facility. Helium implantations were supported by the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a DOE Office of Science user facility jointly operated by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Nickel irradiations were performed at the Ion Beam Materials Laboratory (IBML, https://ibml.utk.edu/) located on the campus of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. We acknowledge the financial support of the Region Normandie–FEDER and ANR / EMC3 Labex, DYNAMITE project and support from Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under task ID 2679.001 for the field-evaporation simulation. We thank James Burns for assistance with sample preparation and running the APT experiments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply.
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - Quantifying chemical compositions around nanovoids is a fundamental task for research and development of various materials. Atom probe tomography (APT) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) are currently the most suitable tools because of their ability to probe materials at the nanoscale. Both techniques have limitations, particularly APT, because of insufficient understanding of void imaging. Here, we employ a correlative APT and STEM approach to investigate the APT imaging process and reveal that voids can lead to either an increase or a decrease in local atomic densities in the APT reconstruction. Simulated APT experiments demonstrate the local density variations near voids are controlled by the unique ring structures as voids open and the different evaporation fields of the surrounding atoms. We provide a general approach for quantifying chemical segregations near voids within an APT dataset, in which the composition can be directly determined with a higher accuracy than STEM-based techniques.
AB - Quantifying chemical compositions around nanovoids is a fundamental task for research and development of various materials. Atom probe tomography (APT) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) are currently the most suitable tools because of their ability to probe materials at the nanoscale. Both techniques have limitations, particularly APT, because of insufficient understanding of void imaging. Here, we employ a correlative APT and STEM approach to investigate the APT imaging process and reveal that voids can lead to either an increase or a decrease in local atomic densities in the APT reconstruction. Simulated APT experiments demonstrate the local density variations near voids are controlled by the unique ring structures as voids open and the different evaporation fields of the surrounding atoms. We provide a general approach for quantifying chemical segregations near voids within an APT dataset, in which the composition can be directly determined with a higher accuracy than STEM-based techniques.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-020-14832-w
DO - 10.1038/s41467-020-14832-w
M3 - Article
C2 - 32094330
AN - SCOPUS:85079800334
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 11
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 1022
ER -