Crystal growth History: Theory and melt growth processes

• Review of the development of crystal growth theory, including Chernov’s contributions. • Historical highlights of techniques developed over centuries for growing bulk crystals from melts, solutions, and the vapor phase. • The various important single crystal materials grown by these techniques. This article gives a brief overview of the field of crystal growth over several centuries-- in fact when it wasn’t a field per se, but a collection of independent scientific studies and commercial ventures undertaken by scientists and engineers from many different disciplines. This all changed after WWII with the development of semiconductor and optical devices requiring high quality single crystals. As a result, the field of crystal growth became an independent entity with societies and its own journal. What is covered here are some of the theoretical milestones along the way towards our current highly sophisticated understanding of crystallization mechanisms, crystalline perfection and some of the methods used to grow large single crystals of many different classes of materials.