Growing intermetallic single crystals using in situ decanting

Abstract

High temperature metallic solution growth is one of the most successful and versatile methods for single crystal growth, and is particularly suited for exploratory synthesis. The method commonly utilizes a centrifuge at room temperature and is very successful for the synthesis of single crystal phases that can be decanted from the liquid below the melting point of the silica ampoule. In this paper, we demonstrate the extension of this method that enables single crystal growth and flux decanting inside the furnace at temperatures above 1200°C. This not only extends the number of available metallic solvents that can be used in exploratory crystal growth but also can be particularly well suited for crystals that have a rather narrow exposed solidification surface in the equilibrium alloy phase diagram.

Keywords:

• single crystal
• crystal growth
• solvent
• high temperature
• decanting

Acknowledgements

We thank Rongwei Hu for help with crystal preparation. Work at Brookhaven and Ames National Laboratories is supported by the US Department of Energy under contracts No. DE-AC02-98CH10886 (C. P.) and DE-AC02-07CH11358 (P.C.C), respectively.