Using alpha hulls to automatically and reproducibly detect edge clusters in atom probe tomography datasets

Researchers in the Atom Probe Group led by Professor Michael Moody have published in Materials Characterization a new method for quantifying the size distribution, chemical composition, and number density of nanometer scale solute clusters in atom probe data which can reproduciby and automatically detect and account for any clusters that are not wholly contained within the volume sampled during the APT experiment, thus removing "edge" effects. The new method has been applied to simulated data sets and also to real datasets, including datasets of complex shape. The effect of accounting for these edge clusters on number density, size and compositional measurements has been investigated in one alloy.