Comparison of the dislocation density obtained by HR-EBSD and X-ray profile analysis

Abstract

Based on the cross correlation analysis of the Kikuchi diffraction patterns high-resolution EBSD is a well established method to determine the internal stress in deformed crystalline materials. In many cases, however, the stress values obtained at the different scanning points have a large (in the order of GPa) scatter. As it was first demonstrated by Wilkinson and co-workers this is due to the long tail of the probability distribution of the internal stress ($P(\sigma)$) generated by the dislocations present in the system. According to the theoretical investigations of Groma and co-workers the tail of $P(\sigma)$ is inverse cubic with prefactor proportional to the total dislocation density $<\rho>$. In this paper we present a direct comparison of the X-ray line broadening and $P(\sigma)$ obtained by EBSD on deformed Cu single crystals. It is shown that $<\rho>$ can be determined from $P(\sigma)$. This opens new perspectives for the application of EBSD in determining mesoscale parameters in a heterogeneous sample.