Indexation of electron diffraction patterns at grain boundaries

Grain boundaries play a vital role in materials science, and they are extensively studied through experimental and numerical methods. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is commonly used to characterize crystalline materials, yet its performance is often compromised at grain boundaries. The key difficulty is to index the overlapped electron backscatter patterns, where Kikuchi bands from multiple crystal orientations coexist. Hough-indexation often fails in treating overlapped EBSP, while the recently proposed dictionary indexation and sphere indexation give only one triplet of Euler angles from overlapped patterns. For all these methods, the orientation indexing precision drops for overlapped EBSP. Here we propose an integrated Digital Image Correlation (DIC) procedure to determine simultaneously and precisely multiple crystal orientations by registering the overlapped EBSP and the master pattern. The contribution ratio of each crystal orientation to the overlapped pattern is also available. Through an experimental EBSD dataset around a triple point, multiple benefits of the rich results from the method are demonstrated, such as refining grain boundaries, revealing EBSD scan errors and quantifying spatial resolution of EBSD. At the grain boundaries, the crystal orientation measurement uncertainty is 0.03^∘ for both indexed crystal orientations, the same order for grain interiors, while their contribution ratios of uncertainty around 0.02 are obtained.