Electron beam damage in high Tc superconductor materials

Electron beam damage in oxides: a review

This review summarizes a variety of beam damage phenomena relating to oxides in (scanning) transmission electron microscopes, and underlines the shortcomings of currently popular mechanisms. These phenomena include mass loss, valence state reduction, phase decomposition, precipitation, gas bubble formation, phase transformation, amorphization and crystallization. Moreover, beam damage is also dependent on specimen thickness, specimen orientation, beam voltage, beam current density and beam size. This article incorporates all of these damage phenomena and experimental dependences into a general description, interpreted by a unified mechanism of damage by induced electric field. The induced electric field is produced by positive charges, which are generated from excitation and ionization. The distribution of the induced electric fields inside a specimen is beam-illumination- and specimen-shape- dependent, and associated with the experimental dependence of beam damage. Broadly speaking, the mechanism operates differently in two types of material. In type I, damage increases the resistivity of the irradiated materials, and is thus divergent, resulting in phase separation. In type II, damage reduces the resistivity of the irradiated materials, and is thus convergent, resulting in phase transformation. Damage by this mechanism is dependent on electron-beam current density. The two experimental thresholds are current density and irradiation time. The mechanism comes into effect when these thresholds are exceeded, below which the conventional mechanisms of knock-on and radiolysis still dominate.

High-resolution electron microscopy of montmorillonite and montmorillonite/epoxy nanocomposites

With the use of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy the structure and morphology of montmorillonite (MMT), a material of current interest for use in polymer nanocomposites, was characterized. Using both imaging theory and experiment, the procedures needed to generate lattice images from MMT were established. These procedures involve careful control of the microscope's objective lens defocus to maximize contrast from features of a certain size, as well as limiting the total dose of electrons received by the sample. Direct images of the MMT lattice were obtained from neat Na+ MMT, organically modified MMT, and organically modified MMT/epoxy nanocomposites. The degree of crystallinity and turbostratic disorder were characterized using electron diffraction and high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM). Also, the extent of the MMT sheets to bend when processed into an epoxy matrix was directly visualized. A minimum radius of curvature tolerable for a single MMT sheet during bending deformation was estimated to be 15 nm, and from this value a critical failure strain of 0.033 was calculated. HREM can be used to improve the understanding of the structure of polymer nanocomposites at the nanometer-length scale.