Search

As hydrogen is touted as a key player in the decarbonization of modern society, it is critical to enable quantitative H analysis at high spatial resolution, if possible at the atomic scale. Indeed, H has a known deleterious impact on the mechanical properties (strength, ductility, toughness) of most materials that can hinder their use as part of the infrastructure of a hydrogen-based economy. Enabling H mapping, including local hydrogen concentration analyses at specific microstructural features, is essential for understanding the multiple ways that H affect the properties of materials, including for instance embrittlement mechanisms and their synergies, but also spatial mapping and quantification of hydrogen isotopes is essential to accurately predict tritium inventory of future fusion power plants, ensuring their safe and efficient operation for example. Atom probe tomography (APT) has the intrinsic capabilities for detecting hydrogen (H), and deuterium (D), and in principle the capacity for performing quantitative mapping of H within a material's microstructure. Yet the accuracy and precision of H analysis by APT remain affected by the influence of residual hydrogen from the ultra-high vacuum chamber that can obscure the signal of H from within the material, along with a complex field evaporation behavior. The present article reports the essence of discussions at a focused workshop held at the Max-Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials in April 2024. The workshop was organized to pave the way to establishing best practices in reporting APT data for the analysis of H. We first summarize the key aspects of the intricacies of H analysis by APT and propose a path for better reporting of the relevant data to support interpretation of APT-based H analysis in materials.

There has been an increasing interest in atom probe tomography (APT) to characterise hydrated and biological materials. A major benefit of APT compared to microscopy techniques more commonly used in biology is its combination of outstanding 3D spatial resolution (~0.2 nm) and mass sensitivity. APT has already been successfully used to characterise biological materials, revealing key structural information at the atomic scale, however there are many challenges inherent to the analysis of hydrated materials. New preparation protocols, often involving sample preparation and transfer at cryogenic temperature, enable APT analysis of hydrated materials and have the potential to enable 3D atomic scale characterisation of biological materials in the near-native hydrated state. In this study, APT specimens of pure water at the tips of tungsten needles were prepared at room temperature by graphene encapsulation. A parametric study was conducted where samples were transferred at either room temperature or cryo-temperature and analysed by APT by varying parameters such as the flight path and pulsing mode. The differences between the acquisition scenarios are presented along with recommendations for future studies.

Recycled aluminum alloys are pivotal for sustainable manufacturing, offering strength, durability, and environmental advantages. However, the presence of iron (Fe) impurities poses a major challenge, undermining their properties and recyclability. Conventional manufacturing processes result in coarse Fe-rich intermetallic compounds that limit the tolerance of Fe content and negatively influence performance of advanced aluminum alloys. To address this, rapid solidification techniques like direct strip casting have been explored. In this work, a detailed study of the strip cast microstructure was conducted by scanning electron microscopy, electron backscattered diffraction and atom probe tomography. Our results reveal that alloys produced by DSC exhibit significantly refined microstructures and are free from coarse Fe-rich intermetallics, thereby retaining the majority of Fe in solid solution. These findings indicate that strip casting significantly enhances Fe-tolerance in aluminum alloys, making it an attractive process for future aluminum recycling, with implications for sustainable high-performance applications.

Accurate extraction of liquid is the first step towards low-volume liquid delivery and nanocharacterization, which plays a significant role in biomedical research. In this study, a tip-shaped graphene nanopipette (GNP) is proposed by encapsulating the biomolecule solution on the prefabricated metal tip with graphene. The volume of the encapsulated liquid is highly controllable at zeptoliter precision by tuning the encapsulating speed and the number of graphene encapsulation rounds. Using protein (ferritin) solution as an example, it has been confirmed by finite element analysis and the controlled experiments that the GNP allows the delivery of ferritin solution at the zeptoliter-scale. Furthermore, GNP is demonstrated as a new type of tip-shaped liquid cell, which is suitable for multiple nanocharacterization techniques. In particular, due to the ultra-sharp tip shape, isotope (13C)-labelled glucose solution encapsulated in GNP has been characterized by atom probe tomography (APT) in the laser-pulsed mode. Analysis of the mass spectrum and the reconstructed three-dimensional chemical maps reveals the quantitative distribution and the compositions of individual glucose molecules. The GNP is expected to be introduced to deliver liquid in the range of zeptoliters to attoliters, and brings a new capability for characterization of biological specimens in their near-native state.

Understanding the structure and chemical composition at the liquid-nanoparticle (NP) interface is crucial for a wide range of physical, chemical and biological processes. In this study, direct imaging of the liquid-NP interface by atom probe tomography (APT) is reported for the first time, which reveals the distributions and the interactions of key atoms and molecules in this critical domain. The APT specimen is prepared by controlled graphene encapsulation of the solution containing nanoparticles on a metal tip, with an end radius in the range of 50 nm to allow field ionization and evaporation. Using Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) in suspension as an example, analysis of the mass spectrum and three-dimensional (3D) chemical maps from APT provides a detailed image of the water-gold interface with near-atomic resolution. At the water-gold interface, the formation of an electrical double layer (EDL) rich in water (H2O) molecules has been observed, which results from the charge from the binding between the trisodium-citrate layer and the AuNP. In the bulk water region, the density of reconstructed H2O has been shown to be consistent, reflecting a highly packed density of H2O molecules after graphene encapsulation. This study is the first demonstration of direct imaging of liquid-NP interface using APT with results providing an atom-by-atom 3D dissection of the liquid-NP interface.

Solute clusters affect the physical properties of alloys. Knowledge of the atomic structure of solute clusters is a prerequisite for material optimisation. In this study, solute clusters in a rapid-hardening Al-Cu-Mg alloy were characterised by a combination of atom probe tomography and density functional theory, making use of a hybrid data type that combines lattice rectification and data completion to directly input experimental data into atomistic simulations. The clusters input to the atomistic simulations are thus observed experimentally, reducing the number of possible configurations. Our results show that spheroidal, compact clusters are more energetically favourable and more abundant., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, published in Scripta Materialia, Jan 2017

Progress in the reconstruction for atom probe tomography has been limited since the first implementation of the protocol proposed by Bas et al. in 1995. This approach, and those subsequently developed, assume that the geometric parameters used to build the three-dimensional atom map are constant over the course of an analysis. Here, we test this assumption within the analyses of low-alloyed materials. By building upon methods recently proposed to measure the tomographic reconstruction parameters, we demonstrate that this assumption can introduce significant limitations in the accuracy of the analysis. Moreover, we propose a strategy to alleviate this problem through the implementation of a new reconstruction algorithm that dynamically accommodates variations in the tomographic reconstruction parameters., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures