Science and Technology of Crystal Growth

The future will reveal an ever increasing demand for crystals having highly specific properties while, at the same time, crystal growth systems will come to be increasingly restricted by environmental and budgetary constraints. If the technology is based on trial and error and the science restricted to irrelevant model systems, these demands will come into conflict. But if technological developments incorporate scientific understanding, then environmental, financial, material and fundamental perspectives often turn out to run surprisingly parallel. It is this integration of approaches to which Science and Technology of Crystal Growth aspires. Starting from basic physical and chemical knowledge, the reader is encouraged to build to the state of the art level, assisted by the many thousands of references to the original literature. The aspects covered range from mass crystallization technology to numerical modeling, from biological materials to fundamental physics, and from chemical reaction dynamics to the nonlinear dynamics of pattern formation. Audience: An ideal starting point for postgraduate researchers and process engineers. A high-level, interdisciplinary approach to crystallization.