Advances in Experimental Study of Grain Growth in Thin Films

An invited review article titled “Advances in Experimental Study of Grain Growth in Thin Films,” was recently published in JOM. The project is led by APAM Professor Katayun Barmak (Philips Electronics Professor) and Matthew Patrick (PhD Candidate, Materials Science) in collaboration with Professor Jeffrey Rickman (Physics; Materials Science, Lehigh University, PA).

The article focuses on recent experimental studies of microstructure in polycrystalline thin films, making the case that these materials are an ideal platform for unravelling the problem of grain growth. The development of a prescriptive theory of this phenomenon is bottlenecked in part by a lack of dynamic experimental data. The authors argue that the “columnar” microstructure of thin films simplifies data acquisition and interpretation as compared to bulk materials.

Thanks to the versatility and recent developments in S/TEM instrumentation and the recent application of deep learning to TEM images of polycrystalline films by the Barmak Group, a one-stop, non-destructive, experimental platform is now being developed with the capabilities to study the detailed, local dynamics of microstructural evolution and grain growth at time-resolutions not possible in other systems.