3D nanoscale elemental mapping of precipitates in steel: Evaluation of analytical electron tomography and comparison to atom probe tomography

To identify different types of precipitates and their composition, analytical electron tomography analysis on aneedle-shaped sample was performed. Three-dimensional chemical maps from each element in a high alloyedsteel are acquired and the resulting elemental maps are jointly reconstructed. Since analytical electron tomographydata suffers from noise, total generalized variation regularization is used to improve the reconstructionquality compared to conventional reconstruction techniques. We analyse the influence of regularization parameterson these reconstructions in terms of elemental quantification, and compare these results to atom probetomography measurements done on another sample of the same material.