Electron Backscatter Diffraction in Materials Science

Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), when employed as an additional characterization technique to a scanning electron microscope (SEM), enables individual grain orientations, local texture, point-to-point orientation correlations, and phase identification and distributions to be determined routinely on the surfaces of bulk polycrystalline materials. The application has experienced rapid acceptance in metallurgical, materials, and geophysical laboratories within the past decade due to the wide availability of SEMs, the ease of sample preparation from the bulk, the high speed of data acquisition, and the access to complimentary information about the microstructure on a submicron scale.