Dear Colleagues,

The microstructural evolution and transformation of phases plays an eminent role in the design and making of structural materials in thermo-mechanical processes, as well as under application, such as aging, creep and fatigue. Moreover, crystal and microstrutural defects play inherent roles in functional materials, such as in semiconductors or solid-state electrochemistry.

Synchrotron, neutron radiation and other quantum beams are established most important probes to elucidate such wide class of microstructural and phase evolution.

The present Special Issue of Quantum Beam Science will focus on all kinds of investigation of microstructures in materials, their kinetics, dynamics and their driving parameters, including mapping (2D and 3D), transformations,  growth or refinement of grains and subgrains, dislocation structures and subgrains, grain boundaries, stress and texture, precipitation, ion gettering, swelling/shrinkage by precipitation of point defects, accumulation of crystal lattice defects by cycling phase transformations, effects and couplings of modulated structures, lattice evolution upon (cyclic) gas or Li ion loading, to mention but the most evident effects.

Methods will include conventional powder diffraction, peak profile analysis, multi-dimensional and grain-resolved diffraction, single crystal studies, combination of enhanced diffraction theories (dynamical theory, coherence), volume mapping, tomographic methods, nano-size diffraction, total scattering, magnetic probing, spectroscopy such as exafs, muons, positrons, inelastic scattering, nuclear resonance….

We envisage both ex-situ investigations of well prepared physical states as well as in-situ observations upon parametric changes of temperature, pressure and load, electric and magnetic fields, chemical potentials. Relevant sizes of objects range from engineering of steel structures, over battery electrodes, millimeter to micrometer size functional materials down to nanometers in micro-electronic devices.

With these aspects in mind, this Special Issue will collect original and review papers employing state-of-the-art quantum beams in applied research and for new and novel developments—both in characterization and in materials.

Prof. Dr. Rozaliya Barabash
Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Liss
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Quantum Beam Science is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• microsstructure
• crystallites
• defects
• grain boundaries
• phase transformations
• kinetics
• dislocation cells
• orientation correlations
• fatigue
• creep
• endurance
• residual stress
• applied fields
• tensors
• lattice response
• deformation mechanisms—slip, twinning, martensitic
• thermal response
• orientation dependence and anisotropy
• texture analysis
• modelling
• electric fields
• magnetic fields
• micro-mechanical modelling
• metals
• Li-ion electrodes
• piezo and ferro-electrics
• magnetic transformations
• functional materials