Novel Approach to Grow ZnO Bulk Crystals

Base on the crystallization behavior of the ZnO-PbF2 system, a flux Bridgman growth technique with a gas cooling system was developed for the growth of ZnO crystal. By optimizing the growth parameters, transparent ZnO crystal with the size of φ25mm×5mm was obtained from the high temperature solutions. As-grown crystal has wurtzite structure with lattice parameters a=0.3252nm and b=0.5209nm, respectively. The preferred growth direction of the ZnO crystals is [0001] determined by X-ray orientation. The growth results show that the flux Bridgman method is a potential approach to grow large size ZnO crystals at low cost.