Micro-Laue Study of Misorientation/Strain Evolution in Electrochemical Epitaxial Crystals

We propose to use the micro-Laue diffraction technique at BM-32 to study the misorientation and strain in thick single-crystalline films grown by electrochemical epitaxy at room temperature. As evidenced by in-house X-ray diffraction and advanced synchrotron Laue microscopy, the samples feature high single crystallinity with a ~0.1° misorientation among domains of a size ~30 um. Without post-synthesis treatment, high-rate growth at room temperature in genera is anticipated to introduce strain buildup in the grown crystals, e.g., among the domain walls. After consultation with the beamline science team, we determined that ex-situ annealing & measurements under an inert gas is possible. The results will provide important fundamental implications for understanding the dynamics of epitaxial growth and strain/misorientation evolution in crystals. In addition, it is directly related to our efforts of building highly reversible crystallographically-textured battery electrodes.