ABSTRACT
Until the 1960s, vapor growth techniques were mainly used to obtain bulk crystals. With the ever-increasing importance of thin lms in technological applications, a range of vapor phase techniques, some of which are extremely sophisticated, have been developed to prepare epitaxial thin lms and are being used extensively. With this changed situation, it looked as though bulk growth of crystals from the vapor phase was no longer relevant. However, the technique has got a big boost in recent years by the great demand for SiC crystals, which are industrially produced by the vapor transport technique. In this chapter, we deal with those techniques that are used to prepare bulk single crystals. In contrast to the epitaxial growth methods, which we discuss in Chapter 11, growth of bulk crystals from the vapor phase is carried out at relatively high pressures. Consequently, the mean free path of the vapor molecules is much smaller here and hence the vapor can be considered as a uid.
