Dr. Alok Singh

Materials scientist studying structure and microstructure of metal and alloys by transmission electron microscopy. Specialize in light metals and quasicrystals.

I am a very senior scientist at the Structural Materials Unit of National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. I studied metallurgical engineering at undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels. My Ph.D. work, at the Indian Institute of Science, was on the study of quasicrystalline and related intermetallic phases in aluminum alloys by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). I tackled the complex structures and reciprocal space of quasicrystals and its indexing problems. I have extensively studied the structure of interfaces between simple crystals and quasicrystals by TEM, and the effect of interfaces on melting and solidification of embedded nanoparticles.

Since 2002 I have been working on magnesium alloys with special emphasis on Mg-Zn-RE alloys containing stable quasicrystal phase. I demonstrated very high strength combined with ductility in these alloys. These high mechanical properties have been analyzed with respect to microstructural characteristics. I have employed TEM to study dislocations, grain boundaries and twins, and interactions among these, to understand deformation behavior of magnesium alloys. Recently, I have applied advanced TEM techniques of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to study severely plastically deformed (SPD, a current trend in materials to achieve nano-scale microstructures) magnesium alloys, which is a challenge for the conventional TEM because of the strong contrast from high amount of mechanical strain.

Website

Japan
Role: 
Senior Scientist
Department: 
Research Center for Structural Materials
Languages: 
English
Hindi
Academic discipline: 
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