Oral Presentation 26th ACMM “2020 Visions in Microscopy”

In-Situ TKD: Heating and Biasing (#28)

Vijay Bhatia 1
  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

In-situ microscopy is a very important tool in the study of materials. Imaging samples after exposure to different stimuli and inferring what processes have occurred creates the potential to miss key pieces of information, which can slow down the development of new materials. The advances of MEMS based heating and biasing chips for the TEM have enabled researchers to observe dynamic processes involving high temperatures (up to 1200°C) and/or through electrical biasing at the atomic scale. While this is a mature technique, the process of using these holders inside an SEM has not been largely documented [1-4]. By adapting this technology and combining it with the versatility of Transmission Kikuchi Diffraction (TKD)[5-6] it is possible to also observe the crystallographic changes that occur in the sample such as the texture of grains, phase transformations and, in some cases, strain measurement [7]. In this work we have shown that it is possible to perform in-situ TKD on poly-crystalline materials under both heating and electrical biasing stimuli, including manganese steels and thermoelectric materials. We discuss the development of this particular in-situ holder geometry for use in the SEM, as well as the limitations and future developments to improve the versatility. We also show how this can be used to screen and test samples for correlation in HR-TEM.

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