Letter abstract
Nature Materials 3, 682 - 686 (2004)
Published online: 26 September 2004 | doi:10.1038/nmat1214
Subject Categories: Metals and alloys | Nanoscale materials | Design synthesis and processing
Directed assembly of controlled-misorientation bicrystals
Robert A. Marks1, Seth T. Taylor1, Ennio Mammana1, Ronald Gronsky1 & Andreas M. Glaeser1
Grain boundaries play a vital role in determining materials behaviour1, 2, 3, and the nature of these intercrystalline interfaces is dictated by chemical composition4, processing history5, and geometry2, 6 (misorientation and inclination). The interrelation among these variables and material properties may be systematically studied in bicrystals7. Conventional bicrystal fabrication offers control over these variables, but its ability to mimic grain boundaries in polycrystalline materials is ambiguous8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Here we describe a novel solid-state process for rapidly generating intercrystalline interfaces with controlled geometry and chemistry, applicable to a broad range of materials. A fine-grained polycrystalline layer, contacted by two appropriately misoriented single-crystal seeds, is consumed by an epitaxial solid-state transformation until the directed growth fronts impinge. The seed misorientations establish the geometry of the resulting intercrystalline boundaries, and the composition of the sacrificial polycrystalline layer establishes the chemistry of the boundaries and their adjacent grains. Results from a challenging model system, titanium-doped sapphire, illustrate the viability of the directed assembly technique for preparing high-quality bicrystals in both twist and tilt configurations.
- Division of Materials Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, California 94720-1760, USA
Correspondence to: Andreas M. Glaeser1 e-mail: aglaeser@sapphire.berkeley.edu
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