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Electron microscopy touches on nearly every aspect of modern life, underpinning materials development for quantum computing, energy and medicine. We discuss the open, highly integrated and data-driven microscopy architecture needed to realize transformative discoveries in the coming decade.

We experimentally investigate the role of size effects and boundary scattering on the thermal conductivity of silicon-germanium alloys. The thermal conductivities of a series of epitaxially grown Si(1-x)Ge(x) thin films with varying thicknesses and compositions were measured with time-domain thermoreflectance. The resulting conductivities are found to be 3 to 5 times less than bulk values and vary strongly with film thickness. By examining these measured thermal conductivities in the context of a previously established model, it is shown that long wavelength phonons, known to be the dominant heat carriers in alloy films, are strongly scattered by the film boundaries, thereby inducing the observed reductions in heat transport. These results are then generalized to silicon-germanium systems of various thicknesses and compositions; we find that the thermal conductivities of Si(1-x)Ge(x) superlattices are ultimately limited by finite size effects and sample size rather than periodicity or alloying. This demonstrates the strong influence of sample size in alloyed nanosystems. Therefore, if a comparison is to be made between the thermal conductivities of superlattices and alloys, the total sample thicknesses of each must be considered.

The displacement damage induced in W and W-5 wt.% Re and W-5 wt.% Ta alloys by 2 MeV W + irradiation to doses 3.3×10 17-2.5×10 19 W + /m 2 at temperatures ranging from 300 to 750°C has been characterized by transmission electron microscopy. An automated sizing and counting approach based on Image J (a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health) [1] has been performed for all near-bulk irradiation data. In all cases the damage comprised dislocation loops, mostly of interstitial type, with Burgers vectors b = ½<111> (> 60%) and b = <100>. The diameters of loops did not exceed 20 nm with most being ≤ 6 nm diameter. The loop number density varied between 10 22 and 10 23 loops/m 3. With increasing irradiation temperature, the loop size distributions shifted towards larger sizes, and there was a substantial decrease in loop number densities. The damage microstructure was less sensitive to dose than to temperature. Under the same irradiation conditions, loop number densities in the W-Re and W-Ta alloys were higher than in pure W but loops were smaller. In grains with normals close to z = <001>, loop strings developed in pure W at temperatures ≥ 500°C and doses ≥ 1.2 dpa, but such strings were not observed in the W-Re or W-Ta alloys. However, in other grain orientations complex structures appeared in all materials and dense dislocation networks formed at higher doses.