This award will partially support a conference focused on Electron Backscattered Diffraction (EBSD) planned for May 24-26, 2010, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the sponsorship of the Microbeam Analysis Society. EBSD is an important technique that utilizes the diffraction of high-energy electrons to determine the orientations of crystals in natural and synthetic materials. Diffraction patterns, which are collected with a sensitive camera, can be indexed and combined with a variety of imaging techniques to analyze spatial variations in the texture of single phase and polyphase materials. The resulting data can yield information about both crystal structure and orientation. This approach has major applications in both material science and geology related to understanding everything from crystallization processes to microstructures that record material histories and affect material properties (such as strength and conductivity).
This is the second meeting of this type in the U.S. (the first was in 2008), although it occurs annually in Europe, and brings practitioners (and newcomers) together from a variety of fields to exchange information about, and experiences with, EBSD. The first day of our conference will be an all-day tutorial aimed at beginners (students and others) who wish to get up to speed with this technique. The next two days will consist of invited and contributed talks, with a goal being significant interaction among the participants. Poster sessions will be organized and highlighted during the session, allowing additional involvement, particularly by students and post-doctoral researchers. NSF funds will be used to subsidize student participation in the conference.
This grant provided $10,000 to subsidize student participation in a conference addressing best practices, novel use, and results of research using Electron Back-Scattered Diffraction (EBSD) techniques. Geoscientists, material scientists, and engineers use EBSD to characterize the orientations of crystals (including minerals and metals) at scales <1/1000 of a millimeter. This information can be used, for example, to improve our understanding of what controls material properties such as physical strength and directional electrical conductivity, and how processing history affects such properties. The EBSD 2010 meeting, sponsored by the Microanalytical Society (MAS), was held on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison from May 24-26, 2010. It brought together practitioners from industry, the national labs, and academia as well as all of the major vendors of EBSD and related equipment. Student numbers increased from 33 at our 2008 meeting to 50 at the 2010 meeting, out of a total of 150 participants. As in 2008, the meeting began with a one-day tutorial on EBSD techniques and applications. The second and third days comprised technical symposia and a poster session presenting the latest developments of the EBSD technique and its application to geology and materials science and engineering. There were several new aspects to the EBSD 2010 meeting. We added laboratory demonstrations to the tutorial day. All four of the EBSD manufacturers were represented during these demonstrations. Generous corporate support allowed us to bring in experts from around the world to staff the tutorial and provide keynote lectures during the meeting proper. We added an additional track of tutorial lectures that were intended for the more advanced practitioners of EBSD with topics such as diffraction physics for EBSD and measurement of plastic deformation (shape change without fracture) using EBSD. Student participants had a major impact on the intellectual interchange at the meeting, presenting 13 of the 38 papers and posters given. In return, they received significant training and networking opportunities. Intellectual merit: This conference highlighted the utility of communication between different user groups. Specifically, the materials science community as a whole has greater expertise in the theory and mechanics of EBSD analysis. The geoscience community, however, has greater expertise in dealing with complex, multiphase (more than one crystal structure and variable chemistry), low symmetry systems. Getting the two communities to talk with one another resulted in cross-disciplinary sharing of these strengths and associated insights. The meeting also provided numerous avenues for communication between users and manufacturers of EBSD equipment, with the latter group offering useful suggestions for how to best utilize equipment, and the former providing feedback on how to improve both software and hardware. Broader Impacts: The conference helped student participants, 38% of whom were women (Figure 1) develop a broader vocabulary for talking between disciplines, provided base-level training for new users, introduced new techniques and ideas, and facilitated valuable networking. It also made clear the importance of this type of conference for students to share their results and get feedback from expert users. Finally, all participants were given the option of a year’s free MAS membership and a copy of the MAS journal. Feedback from the meeting was quite positive. A survey of all attendees was conducted with a 53% response rate. A sampling of responses to "What was the best thing about EBSD 2010?" follows. Attendees wrote: "The quality of the technical talks was excellent!" "Networking with other scientists and vendors including instrument time - answered a number of questions I had." "The opportunity to talk with people applying EBSD to different scientific problems than myself. The tutorial was very good too." Students added: "The first tutorial, in the lab with the actual equipment was the most interesting plus the dinners and the banquet were great to meet people and discuss about EBSD with others." "Opened the door to EBSD as a very important tool for my thesis research" "Accessibility and accommodating nature of the experts. This conference had a really good feel and everyone seemed to get along and converse socially without some of the territorial battling/condescending attitudes seen at other bigger conferences." In response to the question "Did you find the meeting useful?" 94% of respondents marked the meeting as either "well worth the time" or as "a great use of my time."
