Investigating Effects of Alloy Chemical Complexity on Helium Bubble Formation by Accurate Segregation Measurements Using Atom Probe Tomography

Due to its low solubility, He tends to cluster with vacancies to form bubbles in irradiated materials [1]. Previous studies showed that tuning the alloy chemical complexity in concentrated solid-solution alloys (CSAs) can be an effective approach to tailor defect energy landscapes and suppress He bubble growth [1,2]. In CSAs, multiple elements are randomly arranged in simple lattice structures, which generate extreme chemical complexity at the unit-cell level. A comprehensive understanding of how such chemical complexity affects defect generation and migration during irradiation is required. Here, atom probe tomography (APT) is used to accurately measure radiation-induced segregation near He bubbles, providing insight of defect energetics in CSAs. Four CSAs (NiFe, NiCo, NiCoCr, and NiCoFe) and Ni were irradiated by 200 keV He ions at 500°C to a fluence of 5×10 16 He/cm 2 . The size distributions of He bubbles were characterized using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Field evaporation for APT was conducted in laser mode at 45 K with a pulse repetition rate of 200 kHz, a detection rate of 0.004 atoms per pulse, and a 70 pJ laser energy, such that more than twenty million ions were acquired from each sample for compositional analyses. A correlated TEM-APT study showed that He bubbles appeared as high-density regions in the APT reconstructions [3], so iso-density surfaces were used to locate the bubble positions in the APT reconstructions and elemental segregation to the bubble shell was measured using one-dimensional concentration profiles