Abstract
Spatial resolution is one of the key factors in orientation microscopy, as it determines the accuracy of grain size investigation and phase identification. We determined the spatial resolutions of on-axis and off-axis transmission Kikuchi diffraction (TKD) methods by calculating correlation coefficients using only the effective parts of on-axis and off-axis transmission Kikuchi patterns. During the calculation, we used average filtering to evaluate the spatial resolution more accurately. The spatial resolutions of both on-axis and off-axis TKD methods were determined in the same scanning electron microscope at different accelerating voltages and specimen thicknesses. The spatial resolution of the on-axis TKD was higher than that of the off-axis TKD at the same parameters. Furthermore, with an increase in accelerating voltage or a decrease in specimen thickness, the spatial resolutions of the two configurations could be significantly improved, from tens of nanometers to below 10 nm. At a voltage of 30 kV and sample thickness of 74 nm, both on-axis and off-axis TKD methods exhibited the highest resolutions of 6.2 and 9.7 nm, respectively.
Highlights
Electron back-scattering diffraction (EBSD) is a powerful technique in material science for microstructural analyses [1]
The digital image correlation (DIC) technique [15,16,17] was used to investigate the effects of the accelerating voltage and specimen thickness
It has been extensively used to evaluate the physical resolutions of the EBSD
Summary
Electron back-scattering diffraction (EBSD) is a powerful technique in material science for microstructural analyses [1]. The use of nanomaterials has rapidly increased with the development of nanotechnologies. The limited spatial resolution of the EBSD may not be sufficient to reveal the substructures and this may hamper its application in nanomaterial analyses. To improve the spatial resolution of the EBSD, Keller and Geiss changed the EBSD configuration so that the Kikuchi patterns formed by transmitted electrons can be acquired [2]. The resultant electron diffraction technique is referred to as transmission EBSD or off-axis transmission Kikuchi diffraction (off-axis TKD). The pattern center is distant from the center of the detector in the off-axis TKD method, which leads to a considerable distortion. In 2016, Fundenberger et al proposed an on-axis
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