Defects ceramic tool materials

Given the potential future importance of ceramics in areas as diverse as electronics (see Chapter 4), machine tools, heat engines, and superconductors (see Chapter 4), the United States can ill afford to surrender technical leadership to its competitors. The dominant trend in the field is toward materials with finer microstractures, fewer defects, and better interactions at interfaces (particularly in composites). Chemical processes provide important tools to capture the promise of ceramics for the benefit of our society and to maintain our international competitive position in technology. 

Due to its unique ability to directly image the local structure of a thin object with atomic resolution, HRTEM is an extremely powerful tool for materials research. Metals, ceramics, and semiconductors are some examples of prominent materials of interest. HRTEM imaging used to be a high-end research tool mostly used in academia, but has now become standard for a wide variety of applications from materials science research to defect analysis in industrial semiconductor fabrication lines. 

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