Latest Crystal Growth Stories

Collaboration between the University of Southampton and the University of Cambridge has made ground-breaking advances in our understanding of the changes that materials undergo when rapidly heated. Using cutting edge equipment and specially designed MEM's sensors on loan from Mettler-Toledo, scientists from the University of Southampton's Optoelectronic Research Centre and the University of Cambridge's Department of Materials Science were able to probe the behavior of phase change memory...

Scientists take first step toward controlling the growth of nanomaterials without catalystsResearchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently made a significant first step toward understanding how to control the growth of the nanotubes, nanowires and nanorods needed for renewable energy and other technology applications.These nanocrystalline materials, or nanomaterials, possess unique chemical and physical properties that can be used in solar energy panels, high energy density...

Research could improve manufacture of defect-free, thin films needed to make semiconductorsThe quest for faster electronic devices recently got something more than a little bump up in technological knowhow. Scientists at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. discovered that the thin, smooth, crystalline sheets needed to make semiconductors, which are the foundation of modern computers, might be grown into smoother sheets by managing the random darting motions of the atomic particles that affect...

U.S. scientists report the first real-time, direct observation of single nanocrystal growth in solution revealed much of what we thought we knew is wrong. The researchers, led by Berkeley National Laboratory Director Paul Alivisatos and Ulrich Dahmen, director of the lab's National Center for Electron Microscopy, said their study showed that while some crystals in solution grow steadily in size via classical nucleation and aggregation, others grow via coalescence events, in which small...

The creation of a reproducible crystallization process is a fundamental challenge to drug manufacturers, but a technique which provides real time detailed analyses of chemical processes could provide an answer.Developed by engineers at the University of Leeds, the technique uses infrared spectroscopy to monitor supersaturation "“ the levels of chemical saturation in a liquid - required for crystallization to begin to occur.Most drug compounds are crystalline, manufactured in batch process...