Refinements for Bragg coherent X-ray diffraction imaging: Electron backscatter diffraction alignment and strain field computation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an EBSD-based method for aligning microcrystals in BCDI, improving strain measurement accuracy and efficiency by refining orientation determination and strain tensor computation.

Contribution

The study presents a novel approach combining EBSD with BCDI for better crystal orientation alignment and strain field analysis, enhancing measurement precision.

Findings

EBSD provides orientation matrices with less than 6° mismatch compared to Laue diffraction.

Using EBSD for alignment enables multi-reflection BCDI measurements on a single crystal.

Refined strain computation increases accuracy, especially near dislocations.

Abstract

Bragg coherent X-ray diffraction imaging (BCDI) allows the three-dimensional (3D) measurement of lattice strain along the scattering vector for specific microcrystals. If at least three linearly independent reflections are measured, the 3D variation of the full lattice strain tensor within the microcrystal can be recovered. However, this requires knowledge of the crystal orientation, which is typically attained via estimates based on crystal geometry or synchrotron micro-beam Laue diffraction measurements. Here, we present an alternative method to determine the crystal orientation for BCDI measurements, by using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to align Fe-Ni and Co-Fe alloy microcrystals on three different substrates. The orientation matrix is calculated from EBSD Euler angles and compared to the orientation determined using micro-beam Laue diffraction. The average angular mismatch between the orientation matrices is less than ~6 degrees, which is reasonable for the search for Bragg reflections. We demonstrate the use of an orientation matrix derived from EBSD to align and measure five reflections for a single Fe-Ni microcrystal using multi-reflection BCDI. Using this dataset, a refined strain field computation based on the gradient of the complex exponential of the phase is developed. This approach is shown to increase accuracy, especially in the presence of dislocations. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using EBSD to pre-align BCDI samples and the application of more efficient approaches to determine the lattice strain tensor with greater accuracy.