Speaker
Description
The Department of Materials Science at Montanuniversität Leoben offers advanced metallographic preparation techniques utilizing cutting edge equipment such as a fs-laser ablation system, broad ion beam (BIB) polishing devices and focused ion beam (FIB) workstations. These techniques and the combination thereof allows to prepare specimens with minimal surface roughness for cross-sectional high resolution hardness mapping as well as the preparation of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atom probe tomography (APT) specimens. The pre-preparation of TEM or APT specimen blanks via fs-laser ablation can be done less elaborate within minutes. Implementation of custom shapes provides flexibility in the design of contours, discs, half-grids, microtip arrays or even whole sample holders can be realized. In addition, the fs-laser ablation system can be conveniently utilized to pre-thin TEM, or to sharpen APT specimens. Thus, in the case of conventional TEM preparation, dimple grinding can be completely omitted providing samples directly suitable for precision ion polishing (PIPS). For FIB preparation, no lift-out (LO) is necessary, since fs-laser shaped and pre-thinned half grids can be finished to electron transparency within less than an hour. In the case of APT specimen preparation, specimen blanks in the form of posts can be pre-prepared utilizing the fs-laser, which can be finalized to ready-to-run specimens either via final electrolytic etching, FIB, or BIB, avoiding initial steps of cutting and rough electrolytic etching or alternatively again omitting the FIB LO. While whole microtip arrays can be produced to provide a high number of specimens on one single sample, alternatively also half-grids or single posts suitable for correlative microscopy workflows can be produced. In addition, especially the fs-laser ablation system offers a wide range of further possibilities, such as cutting and shaping of micromechanical specimens, specimens for X-ray tomography as well as for cross-sectional X-ray nanodiffraction. Overall, these advanced metallographic preparation techniques offer a significant advancement in materials research at the Department of Materials Science.