The role of single crystals in creating new materials

The role of single crystals in creating new materials

When it comes to creating new materials, single crystals play an important role in presenting a clearer picture of a material’s intrinsic properties. A typical material will be comprised of lots of smaller crystals and the grain boundaries between these crystals can act as impediments, affecting properties such as electrical or thermal resistance.
An exception to this rule is that at high temperature, relative to the melting point, small crystals can have a tendency to slide past one another, a property called creep. It’s for this reason that turbine blades in some jet engines or generators are actually formed from single crystals of nickel-based alloy. A few other everyday applications using single crystals are semi-conductors, detectors, such as infrared or radiation sensors, and lasers.
From a research viewpoint, especially when creating a new material, scientists want to remove as many variables as possible to best understand a material’s properties. A primary way to do this is to begin with raw materials that are as pure as possible and to produce the material as a single crystal. “You don’t want defects in the crystal structure and you don’t want impurities, which can be a source of extra nucleation,”New materials can have new physics, and we can determine what those are if we make measurements on a clean, pristine sample (i.e. single crystal). And if we do that consistently, we can make comparisons to other materials and see how it fits into our understanding of particular behaviors.”
Ames Laboratory scientists employ a number of techniques to grow single crystals, with each suited to producing crystals from different types of materials. However, the basic premise is the same—oversaturate a solution, then precipitate out the crystal.

Edited by simuwu
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