Best practices for preparing radioactive specimens for EBSD analysis.

A wide variety of specimen preparation techniques are available for ensuring that specimen surface finish has the acceptable quality for electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis. These techniques include but are not limited to vibratory polishing, broad, and focused ion beam milling. They have been widely implemented in the field of nuclear materials science with a varying degree of success.

Integrated fiducial sample mount and software for correlated microscopy.

A novel sample mount design with integrated fiducial marks and software for assisting operators in easily and efficiently locating points of interest established in previous analytical sessions is described. The sample holder and software were evaluated with experiments to demonstrate the utility and ease of finding the same points of interest in two different microscopy instruments. Also, numerical analysis of expected errors in determining the same position with errors unbiased by a human operator was performed.