Imaging moving dislocation kinks and buried interfaces by HREM

This paper describes two new electron microscope imaging techniques for materials science. The first allows dislocation kinks to be imaged while in motion on dislocation lines running normal to the electron beam, using lattice images formed with “forbidden” or “termination” Bragg reflections. This is useful for the determination of kink energies, and for the study of obstacles to kink motion, which control ductility at the atomic level. The second uses the specular (mirror-reflected) beam from the interface in a cross-section TEM sample to form an image of the (vertical) interface. This provides a kind of “internal reflection electron microscopy” method which may be useful for the study of atomic processes at interfaces when imaged at elevated temperature using video rate recording.