Ion beam polishing can be particularly useful as a compliment to mechanical polishing to help increase indexing of samples for EBSD analysis. The sample images below show how ion beam polishing helped with increased indexing for a nickel iron alloy sample. Before ion beam polishing, there was no successful indexing of the surface and no grains could be identified. After 40 minutes of polishing, indexing was possible across the whole region and grains were visible on the surface. This sample had 96% indexing on an EBSD run.
Ion beam polishing can increase indexing substantially. Another iron nickel sample was analysed after polishing and it had 99% indexing during an EBSD run.
