The high-penetrating power of hard x-rays along with the sensitivity to crystalline order via x-ray diffraction (XRD) makes it the one of the most important characterization-tools for crystalline materials. Thanks to the high brilliance of modern synchrotron x-ray sources, such as the Swiss Light Source at PSI, an XRD-measurement can be performed in a fraction of a second, allowing mapping of the microstructure in three dimensions from hundreds of thousands of measured diffraction patterns.
With x-ray scattering tensor tomography, materials with nanometer-sized crystallites have been mapped, giving new insight into the structure of human bone. 3D-XRD on the other hand have been used to map metals and geological materials, that contain large well-ordered crystallites. For a range of materials in-between, where the crystallites are neither small enough for tensor-tomography nor large enough for 3D-XRD, no such method has existed until now.
Such materials with micrometer-sized and deformed crystallites are not rare in real-world materials. Hardening in steel relies on generating such small-grained and deformed crystal grains and also in bio-minerals, the biological processes under which the crystallites are formed tend to create such disordered microstructures.
In this study, we demonstrate that a new approach to the data-processing, called texture-tomography, can be used bridge this gap between tensor-tomography and 3D-XRD. This new development opens the possibility to study the evolution of microstructure in-situ as a response to various processing steps and other external stimuli.
Contact
Dr. Mads Allerup Carlsen
Structure and Mechanics of Advanced Materials Group (SMAM)
Center for Photon Science
Paul Scherrer Institute PSI
+41 56 310 41 06
mads.carlsen@psi.ch
Prof. Dr. Marianne Liebi
Structure and Mechanics of Advanced Materials Group (SMAM)
Center for Photon Science
Paul Scherrer Institute PSI
+41 56 310 44 38
marianne.liebi@psi.ch
Original publication
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Carlsen M, Malamud F, Modregger P, Wildeis A, Hartmann M, Brandt R, et al.
Texture tomography with high angular resolution utilizing sparsity
Journal of Applied Crystallography. 2025; 58(2): 484-494. https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576725001426
DORA PSI