Exploring the next neighbourhood relationship in amorphous alloys utilizing atom probe tomography

Studying nearest neighbor correlations by atom probe tomography (APT) in metallic glasses as exemplified for Fe40Ni40B20 glassy ribbons

“…Such an atomic periodicity independent of the elemental correlation, reveals that the underlying principle responsible for periodicity is rather steric: the arrangement of atoms according to the constraint of filling the three dimensional space contrary to the one suggested by Häussler [27]. Intriguingly, the same findings have already been reported for Pd based amorphous alloys [16].…”

“…After all A-atoms have been chosen as center atoms a distribution of the various A-A distances is obtained as shown for five neighbors in Fig. 2 for the glassy Pd-Cu-P alloy [16]. Analogously, pair distributions of B-B and A-B distances are evaluated.…”

“…Conventionally, different algorithms are applied directly to the 3D reconstructed data to glean direct information about clustering or ordering [13][14][15]. Moreover, some approaches exclusively deal with pulling out the information about the atomic distance between neighboring atoms of different species [16][17][18]. In the present study average distances and chemical nature of the next neighbors of all selected atoms are determined for the Fe 40 Ni 40 B 20 metallic glasses in the annealed and in the as prepared state.…”

“…In the present study average distances and chemical nature of the next neighbors of all selected atoms are determined for the Fe 40 Ni 40 B 20 metallic glasses in the annealed and in the as prepared state. Using a next nearest neighbor evaluation (NNE) procedure [16], APT experiments divulge all the possible correlations for different elements of the Fe 40 Ni 40 B 20 metallic glasses both for the as quenched state and heat treated state below the crystallization temperature.…”

Topological Data Analysis for the Characterization of Atomic Scale Morphology from Atom Probe Tomography Images

“…[22] with permission from The Royal Society of Chemistry structure and to more precisely identify features (for example, precipitates and interfaces) from the 3D data [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Because data is in the format of discrete points in some metric space, i.e., a point cloud, many data mining algorithms, which have been developed, are applicable to extract the geometric information embedded in the data [31][32][33][34]. Nevertheless, those geometric-based methods have certain limitations when being applied to solve the problems in atom probe data.…”