Fundamentals Of Quantum Materials: A Practical Guide To Synthesis And Exploration by Paglione Johnpierre; Butch Nicholas P; Rodriguez Efrain E

Fundamentals Of Quantum Materials: A Practical Guide To Synthesis And Exploration by Paglione Johnpierre; Butch Nicholas P; Rodriguez Efrain E

Author:Paglione, Johnpierre; Butch, Nicholas P; Rodriguez, Efrain E
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 7

Floating Zone Crystal Growth

Eli B. Zoghlin* and Stephen D. Wilson†

Materials Department, University of California, Santa Barbara CA USA 93106, USA

*eazuucsb.edu

†[email protected]

7.1.Introduction and Overview

The floating zone crystal growth technique arose from the contemporaneous development by Pfann and Theurer (at Bell Telephone Laboratories) [1] and by Keck et al. (at the Army Signal Corps Laboratories) [2, 3] of a remote means of melting, purifying, and recrystallizing semiconducting material. Either radiant or inductive heating was employed to establish a focused heating zone that locally melts a compound whose melt would then remain suspended via surface tension between solid regions of the material outside of the heating zone. Recrystallization then proceeds as the molten material passes out of the heated zone, and the approach was celebrated as a crucible-free or “floating” means of crystal growth and zone refining purification. The technique was pivotal in the early 1950s for the initial production of semiconductor-grade Ge and Si with impurity concentrations below one part per billion needed for the nascent transistor industry, and it remains at the forefront of the growth of ultrahigh purity electronic and quantum materials today.

This chapter focuses on modern incarnations of floating zone crystal growth, which now predominantly revolve around the use of optical heating sources, for the growth of quantum materials in fundamental research. As such, we do not attempt to cover industrial/applied applications of the technique used, for instance, in the semiconductor and scintillator industries. Instead, our discussion focuses on the approaches, methodologies, and applications of the floating zone technique for the exploration of new quantum materials, many of which host complex energy landscapes strongly renormalized by extrinsic disorder. Due to this sensitivity to disorder, ultrahigh purity single crystal specimens of these materials are essential for experimentally realizing the delicate phases predicted to arise from the extended and competing interactions in their underlying ground states. The technique remains pivotal to advances in fields as diverse as high temperature superconductivity, frustrated magnetism, strongly correlated electron physics, and increasingly in the stabilization of topologically nontrivial electronic states.

In the following sections, we first describe the principle of the floating zone technique as well as highlight examples of its use in the growth of single crystals of quantum materials. Variations of the technique for incongruently melting and volatile materials such as the traveling solvent floating zone technique are then described, followed by a description of the types and operation of typical research-grade floating zone furnaces. We conclude with an overview of floating zone crystal growth at environmental extremes such as the rapidly developing field of high-pressure floating zone growth and briefly discuss the near-term outlook for the technique. We also direct the interested reader to several other recent reviews of the technique and its applications [4–6].



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