A major goal of materials science is to create new engineering materials and optimize their cost and performance. Understanding how adjacent materials behave at their borders is an essential part of this process. Grain boundaries are the longest-known crystal defects, but although they were discovered in the mid-eighteenth century, until quite recently, we did not understand them very well. Even now, scientists are still searching for the best ways to comprehensively characterize a material s microstructure and accurately predict its evolution and behavior.

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