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Directed assembly of controlled-misorientation bicrystals

Nature Materials volume 3, pages 682–686 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

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.

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Figure 1: Illustration of the assembly, growth and structural analysis of a controlled-misorientation twist boundary.
Figure 2: Illustration of the assembly, growth, and structural analysis of a controlled-misorientation tilt boundary.
Figure 3: Chemical analysis performed on the controlled-misorientation twist boundary shown in Fig. 1.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under the Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098. Access to National Center for Electron Microscopy is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Division of Materials Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-1760, California, USA

    Robert A. Marks, Seth T. Taylor, Ennio Mammana, Ronald Gronsky & Andreas M. Glaeser

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Correspondence to Andreas M. Glaeser.

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Marks, R., Taylor, S., Mammana, E. et al. Directed assembly of controlled-misorientation bicrystals. Nature Mater 3, 682–686 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1214

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