Advanced Characterisation

This course focusses on microstructure characterization of materials through interaction between x-ray photons, electrons, neutrons and ion beams and solids.

This includes the emission of element characteristic x-ray radiation as well as Auger electrons and photoelectrons and phenomena such as: absorption, elastic and inelastic scattering, sputtering with ions and depth profiling.

How these effects are exploited for the characterization of materials will be discussed on the example of several common techniques, such as: electron microscopy, x-ray microanalysis, Auger electron spectroscopy, photoelectron spectroscopy, ion scattering spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy. Further, state of the art synchrotron methods will be discussed.

With these, the concepts of depth, spectral and lateral resolution and detection limits will be introduced. Further, common data reduction and evaluation approaches to the high-dimensional hyperspectral data sets acquired by aforementioned techniques will be discussed, as will be the use of tomography for the study of microstructures in 3D volumes.

A special focus will be on Orientation Imaging Microscopy (OIM) based on Electron Back Scatter Diffraction (EBSD) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) imaging. The principles of EBSD will be addressed and methods to determine grain size and shape, texture and misorientation between neighbouring grains. For XRF different sources, optics and detectors will be discussed in detail as well as applications of XRF in various field.