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    Feature Adaptive Sampling for Scanning Electron Microscopy
    ([London] : Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature, 2016) Dahmen, Tim; Engstler, Michael; Pauly, Christoph; Trampert, Patrick; de Jonge, Niels; Mücklich, Frank; Slusallek, Philipp
    A new method for the image acquisition in scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was introduced. The method used adaptively increased pixel-dwell times to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in areas of high detail. In areas of low detail, the electron dose was reduced on a per pixel basis and a-posteriori image processing techniques were applied to remove the resulting noise. The technique was realized by scanning the sample twice. The first, quick scan used small pixel-dwell times to generate a first, noisy image using a low electron dose. This image was analyzed automatically and a software algorithm generated a sparse pattern of regions of the image that require additional sampling. A second scan generated a sparse image of only these regions, but using a highly increased electron dose. By applying a selective low-pass filter and combining both datasets, a single image was generated. The resulting image exhibited a factor of ≈3 better SNR than an image acquired with uniform sampling on a Cartesian grid and the same total acquisition time. This result implies that the required electron dose (or acquisition time) for the adaptive scanning method is a factor of ten lower than for uniform scanning.
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    Plastic Deformation Modes of CuZr/Cu Multilayers
    ([London] : Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature, 2016) Cui, Yan; Abad, Oscar Torrents; Wang, Fei; Huang, Ping; Lu, Tian-Jian; Xu, Ke-Wei; Wang, Jian
    We synthesized CuZr/Cu multilayers and performed nanoindentation testing to explore the dependence of plastic deformation modes on the thickness of CuZr layers. The Cu layers were 18 nm thick and the CuZr layers varied in thickness from 4 nm to 100 nm. We observed continuous plastic co-deformation in the 4 nm and 10 nm CuZr − 18 nm Cu multilayers and plastic-induced shear instability in thick CuZr layers (>20 nm). The plastic co-deformation is ascribed to the nucleation and interaction of shear transformation zones in CuZr layers at the adjacent interfaces, while the shear instability is associated with the nucleation and propagation of shear bands in CuZr layers. Shear bands are initialized in the CuZr layers due to the accumulated glide dislocations along CuZr-Cu interfaces and propagate into adjacent Cu layers via slips on {111} plane non-parallel to the interface. Due to crystallographic constraint of the Cu layers, shear bands are approximately parallel to {111} plane in the Cu layer.