Thermal and Solute Transportation Effects during Bridgman Crystal Growth of II-VI Compounds

The bulk crystal growth of II-VI compounds, such as HgCdTe, CdZnTe etc., is usually carried out by Bridgman and modified Bridgman methods. Optimizing the growth process relies mainly on the understanding of the fundamental problems of solute and thermal transportation principles, which determines the composition segregations and other defects, including point defects, dislocations, precipitates, stacking faults, etc. In the last few years, the present author studied the coupling effects of the convection, thermal and solute transportation phenomena during the growth processes through both theoretical modeling and experimental methods. Several important phenomena, such as effects of ACRT forced convection on the thermal and solute field and the growth interface morphology, the shift of the growth interface due to the solute redistributions, solute segregation behaviors during the growth process, etc, are discussed. Based on these researches, technologies for growing high quality CdZnTe and other II-VI compounds have been developed.