New View of Subsurface Defects
Our paper was just published in Science Advances showing how time-resolved Dark-Field X-ray Microscopy can now allow us to watch how line defects (dislocations) move deep inside mm-scale crystals.
In this first demonstration of the exciting new technique, we demonstrated how a stabilizing boundary loses its inherent stability just at the edge of melting. This new view allows us to understand how a crystal lattice destabilizes as it approaches the melting temperature — at a scale we haven’t had access to before.