Growth of Oriented Single Crystals from Low Melting Metals

Interest in metal single crystals began many years ago with research on metal deformation properties. Since that time, the use of single crystals in the laboratory has greatly increased with work on the solid state of matter. Frequently, the crystals must be of a specific lattice orientation for determination of physical and mechanical properties in the various crystallographic directions. An urgent need for such oriented single crystals led to the development at the Ames Laboratory of a method for producing large single crystals of controlled shape and orientation from small seed crystals of the desired final orientation. The technique has been given the name casting-bonding/