“…Many commercially important alloys exhibit microstructural and phase changes that occur over time scales that may extend from months to years. These include topologically closepacked phase formation in the nickel-base superalloys used in gas turbine engines (Simonetti & Caron, 1998;Tin & Pollock, 2003;Acharya & Fuchs, 2004;Yang et al, 2007), phase separation and intermetallic precipitation in iron-based alloys used in power generation (Chung & Leax, 1990;Murayama et al, 1999;Danoix & Auger, 2000;Sourmail, 2001), and microstructural evolution in aluminium alloys (Braun, 2006;Katsikis et al, 2008;Lukina et al, 2011). Traditionally, these phenomena have been studied by ex situ examination of preexposed samples.…”