High-precision orientation mapping from spherical harmonic transform indexing of electron backscatter diffraction patterns

Gregory Sparks; Paul A Shade; Michael D Uchic; Stephen R Niezgoda; Michael J Mills; Mark Obstalecki

doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2020.113187

High-precision orientation mapping from spherical harmonic transform indexing of electron backscatter diffraction patterns

Ultramicroscopy. 2021 Mar:222:113187. doi: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2020.113187. Epub 2020 Dec 17.

Authors

Gregory Sparks¹, Paul A Shade², Michael D Uchic², Stephen R Niezgoda³, Michael J Mills³, Mark Obstalecki²

Affiliations

¹ Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH 45433, USA; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. Electronic address: sparks.378@osu.edu.
² Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH 45433, USA.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.

PMID: 33454536
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2020.113187

Abstract

The angular precision of crystal orientation determination by cross-correlating dynamically simulated electron diffraction patterns with experimental patterns via spherical harmonic analysis is investigated. The best precision found in this study is 0.016°, which approaches the level reported in the literature for other high-precision electron backscatter diffraction implementations. At this angular precision, the noise floor for geometrically necessary dislocation density calculations is found to be approximately 5×10¹³ m^-2 at a 200 nm step size. Conventional Hough-transform indexing of the same raw patterns gave an angular precision of 0.156° and a dislocation noise floor of 6×10¹⁴ m^-2, an order of magnitude larger for both parameters, albeit better than is typical for Hough indexing due to the high-quality patterns used. Experimental trade-off curves of precision versus exposure time, pattern resolution (i.e. camera binning), and analysis bandwidth are also presented, allowing for optimization of data collection and analysis rates once the desired level of precision has been determined.

Keywords: Dislocation density; Electron backscatter diffraction; High resolution EBSD; Indexing; Spherical harmonic transform.