Electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) is a technique for determining the near surface crystallographic and microstructural properties of a material. It is based on the automated capture and analysis of diffraction patterns formed when a sample is excited by an electron beam within a scanning electron microscope (SEM). This type of analysis is of particularly high value in metallurgy: new materials discovery, process development and quality control of existing processes.
While the roots of EBSD in a SEM go back 30 years, the advent of high performance cameras, increased computational power and automated analysis routines has driven a recent boom in applications across materials science and quality control. Compared to other structural analysis techniques, EBSD has significant advantages: faster, less costly and less onerous sample preparation than electron diffraction in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) and with a spatial resolution many hundreds of times greater than X-ray diffraction. Modern EBSD systems are now fast and versatile, yielding rich quantitative datasets in 2D and 3D with sub-micron resolution and with most analyses of metallurgical samples completed in less than 20 minutes.