Over the years, many successful attempts have been made to describe the art and science of crystal growth, and many review articles, monographs, symposium vol-umes, and handbooks have been published to present comprehensive reviews of the advances made in this
field. These publications are testament to the grow-ing interest in both bulk and thin-film crystals because of their electronic, optical, mechanical, microstructural, and other properties, and their diverse scientific and technological applications. Indeed, most modern ad-vances in semiconductor and optical devices would not have been possible without the development of many elemental, binary, ternary, and other compound crystals of varying properties and large sizes. The literature devoted to basic understanding of growth mechanisms, defect formation, and growth processes as well as the design of growth systems is therefore vast.
The objective of this Springer Handbook is to present the state of the art of selected topical ar-eas of both bulk and thin-film crystal growth. Our goal is to make readers understand the basics of the commonly employed growth processes, materials pro-duced, and defects generated. To accomplish this, we have selected more than 50 leading scientists, re-searchers, and engineers, and their many collaborators from 22 different countries, to write chapters on the topics of their expertise. These authors have written 52 chapters on the fundamentals of crystal growth and defect formation; bulk growth from the melt, solu-tion, and vapor; epitaxial growth; modeling of growth processes and defects; and techniques of defect char-acterization, as well as some contemporary special topics.
This Springer Handbook is divided into seven parts. Part A presents the fundamentals: an overview of the growth and characterization echniques, followed by the state of the art of nucleation at surfaces, morphol-ogy of crystals grown from solutions, nucleation of dislocation during growth, and defect formation and morphology.
Part B is devoted to bulk growth from the melt, a method critical to producing large-size crystals. The chapters in this part describe the well-known processes such as Czochralski, Kyropoulos, Bridgman, and float-ing zone, and focus specifically on recent advances in improving these methodologies such as application of magnetic fields, orientation of the growth axis, intro-duction of a pedestal, and shaped growth. They also cover a wide range of materials from silicon and III–V compounds to oxides and fluorides.
The third part, Part C of the book, focuses on so-lution growth. The various aspects of hydrothermal growth are discussed in two chapters, while three other chapters present an overview of the nonlinear and laser crystals, KTP and KDP. The knowledge on the effect of
gravity on solution growth is presented through a com-parison of growth on Earth versus in a microgravity environment.
The topic of Part D is vapor growth. In addition to presenting an overview of vapor growth, this part also provides details on vapor growth of silicon carbide, gallium nitride, aluminum nitride, and organic semi-conductors. This is followed by chapters on epitaxial growth and thin films in Part E. The topics range from chemical vapor deposition to liquid-phase epitaxy to pulsed laser and pulsed electron deposition.
Modeling of both growth processes and defect formation is presented in Part F. These chapters demonstrate the direct correlation between the process parameters and quality of the crystal produced, includ-ing the formation of defects. The subsequent Part G presents the techniques that have been developed for crystalline material characterization and analysis. The chapters in Parts F and G demonstrate how well pre-dictive tools and analytical techniques have helped the design and control of growth processes for better-quality crystals of large sizes.
The final Part H is devoted to some selected con-temporary topics in this field, such as protein crystal growth, crystallization from gels, in situ structural studies, growth of single-crystal scintillation materials, photovoltaic materials, and wire-saw slicing of large crystals to produce wafers.
We hope this Springer Handbook will be useful to graduate students studying crystal growth and to researchers, scientists, and engineers from academia and industry who are conducting or intend to conduct research in this field as well as those who grow crystals.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to
Dr. Claus Acheron and Dr. Werner Skolaut of Springer and Ms Anne Strohbach of le-tex for their extraordinary efforts without which this handbook would not have taken its final shape.
We thank our authors for writing comprehensive chapters and having patience with us during the publi-cation of this Handbook. One of the editors (GD) would like to thank his family members and Dr. Kedar Gupta (CEO of ARC Energy) for their generous support and encouragement during the entire course of editing this handbook. Acknowledgements are also due to Peter Rudolf, David Bliss, Ishwara Bhat, and Partha Dutta for their help in editing Parts A, B, E, and H, respectively.
Nashua, New Hampshire, April 2010 G. Dhanaraj
Mysore, India K. Byrappa
Denton, Texas V. Prasad
Stony Brook, New York M. Dudley

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