Hydrogen detection in metals: a review and introduction of a Kelvin probe approach

Hydrogen in materials is an important topic for many research fields in materials science. Hence in the past quite a number of different techniques for determining the amount of hydrogen in materials and for measuring hydrogen permeation through them have been developed. Some of these methods have found widespread application. But for many problems the achievable sensitivity is usually not high enough and ready-to-use techniques providing also good spatial resolution, especially in the submicron range, are very limited, and mostly not suitable for widespread application. In this work this situation will be briefly reviewed and a novel scanning probe technique based method introduced.