Zemp J, Gerstl S S A, Löffler J F, Schönfeld B
Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Scientific Center for Optical and Electron Microscopy, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Ultramicroscopy. 2016 Mar;162:35-41. doi: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2015.11.014. Epub 2015 Dec 1.
Field evaporation of metallic glasses is a stochastic process combined with spatially and temporally correlated events, which are referred to as clustered evaporation (CE). This phenomenon is investigated by studying the distance between consecutive detector hits. CE is found to be a strongly localized phenomenon (up to 3nm in range) which also depends on the type of evaporating ions. While a similar effect in crystals is attributed to the evaporation of crystalline layers, CE of metallic glasses presumably has a different - as yet unknown - physical origin. The present work provides new perspectives on quantification methods for atom probe tomography of metallic glasses.
