Lars Johnson

Microstructure evolution during the isostructural decomposition of TiAlN—A combined in-situ small angle x-ray scattering and phase field study

This paper describes details of the spinodal decomposition and coarsening in metastable cubic Ti0.33Al0.67N and Ti0.50Al0.50N coatings during isothermal annealing, studied by in-situ small angle x-ray scattering, in combination with phase field simulations. We show that the isostructural decomposition occurs in two stages. During the initial stage, spinodal decomposition, of the Ti0.50Al0.50N alloy, the phase separation proceeds with a constant compositional wavelength of � 2.8nm of the AlN- and TiN-rich domains. The time for spinodal decomposition depends on annealing temperature as well as alloy composition. After the spinodal decomposition, the coherent cubic AlN- and TiN-rich domains coarsen. The coarsening rate is kinetically limited by diffusion, which allowed us to estimate the diffusivity and activation energy of the metals to 1.4 � 10 � 6 m 2 s � 1 and 3.14eV at � 1 , respectively. V C 2013 AIP Publishing LLC .[ http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4809573]

Reduction of multiple hits in atom probe tomography.

The accuracy of compositional measurements using atom probe tomography is often reduced because some ions are not recorded when several ions hit the detector in close proximity to each other and within a very short time span. In some cases, for example in analysis of carbides, the multiple hits result in a preferential loss of certain elements, namely those elements that frequently field evaporate in bursts or as dissociating molecules. In this paper a method of reducing the effect of multiple hits is explored. A fine metal grid was mounted a few millimeters behind the local electrode, effectively functioning as a filter. This resulted in a decrease in the overall detection efficiency, from 37% to about 5%, but also in a decrease in the fraction of multiple hits. In an analysis of tungsten carbide the fraction of ions originating from multiple hits decreased from 46% to 10%. As a result, the measured carbon concentration increased from 48.2 at%to 49.8 at%, very close to the expected 50.0 at%. The characteristics of the multiple hits were compared for analyses with and without the grid filter.

Nanolabyrinthine ZrAlN thin films by self-organization of interwoven single-crystal cubic and hexagonal phases

Self-organization on the nanometer scale is a trend in materials research. Thermodynamic driving forces may, for example, yield chessboard patterns in metal alloys [Y. Ni and A. G. Khachaturyan, Nature Mater. 8, 410–414 (2009)]10.1038/nmat2431 or nitrides [P. H. Mayrhofer, A. Horling, L. Karlsson, J. Sjolen, T. Larsson, and C. Mitterer, Appl. Phys. Lett. 83, 2049 (2003)]10.1063/1.1608464 during spinodal decomposition. Here, we explore the ZrN-AlN system, which has one of the largest positive enthalpies of mixing among the transition metal aluminum nitrides [D. Holec, R. Rachbauer, L. Chen, L. Wang, D. Luefa, and P. H. Mayrhofer, Surf. Coat. Technol. 206, 1698–1704 (2011)10.1016/j.surfcoat.2011.09.019; B. Alling, A. Karimi, and I. Abrikosov, Surf. Coat. Technol. 203, 883–886 (2008)]10.1016/j.surfcoat.2008.08.027. Surprisingly, a highly regular superhard (36 GPa) two-dimensional nanolabyrinthine structure of two intergrown single crystal phases evolves during magnetron sputter thin film synthesis of Zr0.64A...

High temperature phase decomposition in TixZryAlzN

Through a combination of theoretical and experimental observations we study the high temperature decomposition behavior of c-(TixZryAlzN) alloys. We show that for most concentrations the high forma ...

Blind deconvolution of time-of-flight mass spectra from atom probe tomography

A major source of uncertainty in compositional measurements in atom probe tomography stems from the uncertainties of assigning peaks or parts of peaks in the mass spectrum to their correct identities. In particular, peak overlap is a limiting factor, whereas an ideal mass spectrum would have peaks at their correct positions with zero broadening. Here, we report a method to deconvolute the experimental mass spectrum into such an ideal spectrum and a system function describing the peak broadening introduced by the field evaporation and detection of each ion. By making the assumption of a linear and time-invariant behavior, a system of equations is derived that describes the peak shape and peak intensities. The model is fitted to the observed spectrum by minimizing the squared residuals, regularized by the maximum entropy method. For synthetic data perfectly obeying the assumptions, the method recovered peak intensities to within ±0.33 at%. The application of this model to experimental APT data is exemplified with Fe-Cr data. Knowledge of the peak shape opens up several new possibilities, not just for better overall compositional determination, but, e.g., for the estimation of errors of ranging due to peak overlap or peak separation constrained by isotope abundances.