The right twist – Understanding the principles guiding biomorph formation via multi-modal Texture tomography

The fabrication of micro and mesoscale 3D shaped crystalline materials remains an exquisite challenge for materials science. A prominent bottom-up approach is the self-assembly of silica biomorphs. They are composed of crystalline carbonate nano-rods embedded into an amorphous silica matrix. A striking feature are their different, curved morphologies. Understanding the emergence, respective driving forces and resulting material properties are still open questions, which hinder a more wide-spread application of these structures.
Here, we propose to address these questions with multi-modal x-ray texture tomography at ID13 to understand the crystalline make-up via texture tomography, and the associated microstructure (particle size, strain, dislocation) patterns via 3D Rietveld refinement.
From these results, we aim at deriving more general insights into how strain, crystallographic texture and dislocations shape these curved structures.