TUTORIAL:

 Advances in Electron Microscopy for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Speaker: Professor Dr Jeff Th.M. De Hosson, Department of Applied Physics, Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, the Netherlands

Undisputedly microscopy plays a predominant role in unravelling the underpinning mechanisms in plastic deformation of materials. There are at least two reasons that hamper a straightforward correlation between microscopic structural information and mechanical properties: one fundamental and one practical reason. First, the defects affecting these properties are in fact not in thermodynamic equilibrium and their behaviour is very much non-linear. Second, a quantitative evaluation of the structure-property relationship can be rather elusive because of statistics. In particular, situations where there is only a small volume fraction of defects present or a very inhomogeneous distribution statistical sampling may be a problem. A major drawback of experimental research in this field is that most of the microscopy work has been concentrated on static structures. In this short workshop various possibilities will be discussed to circumvent these problems via in situ microscopy. Examples of in situ nano-indentations, straining, heating and electron holography experiments on nano-sized materials will be presented.