Additively manufactured hierarchical stainless steels with high strength and ductility.

Many traditional approaches for strengthening steels typically come at the expense of useful ductility, a dilemma known as strength-ductility trade-off. New metallurgical processing might offer the possibility of overcoming this. Here we report that austenitic 316L stainless steels additively manufactured via a laser powder-bed-fusion technique exhibit a combination of yield strength and tensile ductility that surpasses that of conventional 316L steels.

High speed direct imaging of thin metal film ablation by movie-mode dynamic transmission electron microscopy.

Obliteration of matter by pulsed laser beams is not only prevalent in science fiction movies, but finds numerous technological applications ranging from additive manufacturing over machining of micro- and nanostructured features to health care. Pulse lengths ranging from femtoseconds to nanoseconds are utilized at varying laser beam energies and pulse lengths, and enable the removal of nanometric volumes of material. While the mechanisms for removal of material by laser irradiation, i.

Structure and phase transitions at the interface between α-Al2O3 and Pt.

The structure and thermodynamics of interfaces between (111) Pt and the basal plane of α-Al2O3 have been studied through a combination of high-resolution electron microscopy and first-principles calculations. Within the framework of ab initio thermodynamics the structure and excess free energies are calculated as functions of temperature (T) and oxygen partial pressure (PO2), for three competing interface terminations. Comparisons between measurements and calculations establish that the interface is oxygen terminated, and a structural phase transition is predicted in the range of experimentally accessible T and PO2 from the calculated interfacial free energies.

Approaches for ultrafast imaging of transient materials processes in the transmission electron microscope.

The growing field of ultrafast materials science, aimed at exploring short-lived transient processes in materials on the microsecond to femtosecond timescales, has spawned the development of time-resolved, in situ techniques in electron microscopy capable of capturing these events. This article gives a brief overview of two principal approaches that have emerged in the past decade: the stroboscopic ultrafast electron microscope and the nanosecond-time-resolved single-shot instrument. The high time resolution is garnered through the use of advanced pulsed laser systems and a pump-probe experimental platforms using laser-driven photoemission processes to generate time-correlated electron probe pulses synchronized with laser-driven events in the specimen.