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Recent trends and open questions in grain boundary segregation

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Abstract

Recently, significant progress in the field of grain boundary segregation was achieved, for example, in better understanding and modeling the stabilization of nanocrystalline structures by grain boundary segregation, searching for more advanced approaches to theoretical calculation of segregation energies and development of the complexion approach. Nevertheless, with each progress, new important questions appear which need to be solved. Here, we focus on two basic questions appearing recently: How can be the experimental results on the grain boundary segregation compared reliably to their theoretical counterparts? Is the preferred segregation site of a solute in the grain boundary core substitutional or interstitial? We also show that the entropy of grain boundary segregation is a very important quantity which cannot be neglected in thermodynamic considerations as it plays a crucial role, for example, in prediction of thermodynamic characteristics of grain boundary segregation and in the preference of the segregation site at the boundary.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [Projects Nos. GB P108/12/G043 (PL) and GA 16-24711S (MŠ, MV)], by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic [Institutional Projects RVO:68378271 (PL) and RVO:68081723 (MŠ, MV)], and by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic under the project CEITEC 2020 (LQ1601) (MŠ, MV). Computational resources were provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic under the Projects CESNET (Project No. LM2015042), CERIT-Scientific Cloud (Project No. LM2015085), and IT4Innovations National Supercomputer Center (Project No. LM2015070) within the program Projects of Large Research, Development and Innovations Infrastructures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 182 21, Praha 8, Czech Republic

    Pavel Lejček

  2. Central European Institute of Technology, Masaryk University, CEITEC MU, 625 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Monika Všianská & Mojmír Šob

  3. Institute of Physics of Materials, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 616 62, Brno, Czech Republic

    Monika Všianská & Mojmír Šob

  4. Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, 611 37, Brno, Czech Republic

    Monika Všianská & Mojmír Šob

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  1. Pavel Lejček
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  2. Monika Všianská
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  3. Mojmír Šob
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Correspondence to Pavel Lejček.

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Lejček, P., Všianská, M. & Šob, M. Recent trends and open questions in grain boundary segregation. Journal of Materials Research 33, 2647–2660 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2018.230

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