The European Research Council (ERC) awarded a Consolidator Grant of EUR 2M for five years to Dr. Baptiste Gault, leader of the Atom Probe Tomography group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung. In his research project âSHINE â Seing Hydrogen In Matterâ?, Gault will seek to provide three-dimensional hydrogen mapping at near-atomic scale in metallic alloys and materials for hydrogen storage. The team of Max-Planck scientists will use a correlative microscopy and spectroscopy approach combined with atomistic simulations in order to provide a mechanistic understanding of hydrogen behaviour in materials. Atom probe tomography will be at the core of SHINE and Dr. Gault plans to develop the hardware and data-mining methods to maximise data quality.
Previous approaches to determine the origin of hydrogen in a material through atom probe tomography were limited by the presence of a residual partial pressure of H in the analysis chamber. The new approach will use an ultrahigh vacuum cryogenic transfer which connects two atom probe microscopes with a scanning electron microscope fitted with a xenon-plasma gun.
