Use of frit-disc crucibles for routine and exploratory solution growth of single crystalline samples

Abstract

Solution growth of single crystals from high temperature solutions often involves the separation of residual solution from the grown crystals. For many growths of intermetallic compounds, this separation has historically been achieved with the use of plugs of silica wool. Whereas this is generally efficient in a mechanical sense, it leads to a significant contamination of the decanted liquid with silica fibres. In this paper, we present a simple design for frit-disc alumina crucible sets that has made their use in the growth single crystals from high temperature solutions both simple and affordable. An alumina frit-disc allows for the clean separation of the residual liquid from the solid phase. This allows for the reuse of the decanted liquid, either for further growth of the same phase, or for subsequent growth of other, related phases. In this paper, we provide examples of the growth of isotopically substituted TbCd and icosahedral i-RCd quasicrystals, as well as the separation of (i) the closely related and phases and (ii) and .

Keywords:

• Crystals
• phase diagrams
• solution growth

Acknowledgements

The development of crystal growth techniques and tools is often evolutionary. P.C.C would like to acknowledge and thank a string of former post-doctoral researchers who were part of this evolution: Ian Fisher (Ta 3-cap) [8], Cedomir Petrovic (the initial BN frit-disc prototypes as well as the threaded frit-disc development [9]) and Rongwei Hu (for having steered my attention towards LSP Ceramics [10] for potential production).

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Science, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering. The research was performed at the Ames Laboratory. Ames Laboratory is operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Iowa State University under Contract [DE-AC02-07CH11358]. N. H. Jo was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations EPiQS Initiative through [grant number GBMF4411].