Crystal Growth Principles and Progress

This book is the second in a series of scientific textbooks designed to cover advances in selected research fields from a basic and general viewpoint, so that only limited knowledge is required to understand the significance of recent developments. Further assistance for the non-specialist is provided by the summary of abstracts in Part 2, which includes many of the major papers published in the research field. Crystal Growth of Semiconductor Materials has been the subject of numerous books and reviews and the fundamental principles are now well-established. We are concerned chiefly with the deposition of atoms onto a suitable surface - crystal growth - and the generation of faults in the atomic structure during growth and subsequent cooling to room temperature - crystal defect structure. In this book I have attempted to show that whilst the fundamentals of these processes are relatively simple, the complexities of the interactions involved and the individuality of different materials systems and growth processes have ensured that experimentally verifiable predictions from scientific principles have met with only limited success - good crystal growth remains an art. However, recent advances, which include the reduction of growth temperatures, the reduction or elimination of reactant transport variables and the use of better-controlled energy sources to promote specific reactions, are leading to simplified growth systems.