Annealing in a temperature gradient can be regarded as a "high throughput" experiment,since a series of annealing experiments is replaced by a single experimental run in the gradient.This is a straightforward thought; however,the potential applications of temperature gradients reach far beyond.If a multi phase microstructure is held in a temperature gradient,an abundance of physical processes occurs,such as local equilibration,concentration gradient formation,liquid film migration,temperature gradient zone melting,microstructural instabilites,coarsening,banding,etc.This (still very incomplete) list of processes indicates the strong dynamics of multi phase structures that is far from being completely understood,especially since all the processes will interact with each other and cannot be treated separately.