Nanoscale speckle patterning for combined high‐resolution strain and orientation mapping of environmentally sensitive materials

Abstract Scanning electron microscopy‐based high‐resolution digital image correlation (HRDIC) is now an established technique, providing full‐field strain and displacement measurement at the microscale. Techniques for generating speckle patterns for sub‐micron strain mapping can often be either substrate dependent or rely on applying aggressive conditions which may alter the microstructure of interest or damage the substrate in highly sensitive materials. We detail a modification of a methodology successfully applied in the literature to allow its use with metallic materials that are particularly sensitive to the corrosive media, such as copper‐base alloys. Nanometre‐thick silver films, applied with physical vapour deposition, are remodelled using NaBr in non‐aqueous isopropanol, replacing the aqueous solution of NaCl in the original method, forming a uniform dispersion of silver islands highly suitable for digital image correlation (DIC) measurement. The entire procedure is performed at ambient temperature. We find that the DIC pattern is suitably electron transparent to allow electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) measurements without pattern removal, producing diffraction patterns of sufficient quality for cross‐correlation based high‐angular resolution EBSD. This property facilitates simultaneous EBSD and DIC mapping experiments, providing deeper insights into the kinematics of plastic deformation in crystalline materials. Sub‐100 nm islands are achieved through control of the sputter coating parameters, resulting in DIC cross‐correlation subwindows of 140 nm with a 50% overlap. This resolution is sufficient to capture the fine detail of strain localisation phenomena during plastic deformation, demonstrated here with a case study in CuCrZr, a precipitation‐hardened heat sink material for application in nuclear fusion components. Here, we extract full‐field displacement data with DIC and corresponding orientation information using EBSD without the need for pattern removal.