Crystal Growth

Background

High quality crystals are crucial to many defense and commercial applications such as electronic and opto-electronic devices, lasers, sensors, fiber optics, solar cells and MEMS systems.

The processes used for the growth of single crystals usually involve highly complex fluid and heat transport phenomena. Understanging these phenomena and their effects on crystal growth is of vital importance for the design and construction of equipment and the optimization and control of the manufacturing processes.

Collaborating with our university and industrial partners in the DARPA/AFOSR Consortium for Crystal Growth Research, we are developing a parallel code for the realistic simulation of growth processes of Silicon and Indium Phosphide.

The group at AMS involved in this project consists of Wing Chui, William Garber, James Glimm, and Folkert Tangerman.

Simulations

We perform simulations on the growth process of Silicon crystal. See our paper explaining the approach used and detailing the results.

Temperature contour. The upper half is the growing crystal and the lower half is the melt.
Stream function contour of fluid flow in the melt.