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Abstract
Investigating domain boundaries and their effects on the behaviour of materials automatically implies the need for detailed knowledge on the structural aspects of the atomic configurations at these interfaces. Not only in view of nearest neighbour interactions but also at a larger scale, often surpassing the unit cell, the boundaries can contain structural elements that do not exist in the bulk. In the present contribution, a number of special boundaries resulting from phase transformations or crystal growth and those recently investigated by advanced transmission electron microscopy techniques in different systems will be reviewed. These include macrotwins between microtwinned martensite plates in Ni–Al, austenite-single variant martensite habit planes in low hysteresis Ni–Ti–Pd, nanotwins in non-textured nanostructured Pd and ferroelastic domain boundaries in CaTiO3. In all discussed cases these boundaries play an essential role in the properties of the respective materials.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge financial support from the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (References G.0064.10N and G.0465.05) and the Flemish Hercules 3 programme for large infrastructure. S.T. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO) for a postdoctoral grant. The authors also thank MULTIMAT ‘Multi-scale modeling and characterization for phase transformations in advanced materials’, a Marie Curie Research Training Network (MRTN-CT-2004-505226). The support of the ‘Fonds Belge pour la Recherche dans l’Industrie et l’Agriculture (FRIA)’ for M.S.C. and of the Belgian Science Policy through the IAP 6/24 project is gratefully acknowledged. R. James (Univ. of Minnesota, USA) is acknowledged for providing the TiNiPd material and the group of T. Pardoen (UCL, Belgium) for the Pd nanobeams.