Across a wide-range of applications in materials science, there is growing interest in being able to accurately detect, locate and quantify the presence of hydrogen in the microstructures of materials. These include modern high-strength steels, Ni-alloys and Ti-alloys for aerospace and other engineering applications, broadly aiming to understand how to make components more resistant to the...
While atom probe experiments to detect hydrogen are not new, special measures had to be taken to distinguish the H detected from the specimen from the contaminant unless molecular ion formation enabled identification. This is largely due to the residual hydrogen in conventional stainless steel atom probes. The distinction was mostly made by isotope, using deuterium or recently even tritium as...
So far, the most common practice for measuring H at microstructural features in APT is using the heavier isotope deuterium in combination with voltage pulses. For metals with a high evaporation field, including steels, the formation of H2+ ions is inhibited. Hence, the peak at 2 Da can solely be attributed to D, which was introduced via electrochemical or gas charging, or implantation. But...
