3. Conclusion
In summary, we found that the nucleation and crystal growth are favored for 3C than for 4H if the difference between the\(\sigma_{3C/\text{melt}}-\sigma_{4H/\text{melt}}\) is negative enough by the modification of the melt surface tension, beyond what’s expected by classic nucleation theory. This led to the growth of high quality and wafer-scale bulk 3C-SiC single crystals via TSSG. The diameter and the thickness of the 3C-SiC ingot is 4-inch and 4.0~10.0 mm, respectively. More importantly, this TSSG route provides a reliable method to grow high-quality wafer-scale 3C-SiC, exhibiting the potential for further mass production. The grown 3C-SiC single crystals show high-crystallinity, high conductivity and availability, which are very suitable for homogeneous epitaxy and device fabrication. Better homoepitaxy 3C films and the power devices are expected to be fabricated, and thus boost the SiC industry further. Alteration of interfacial energy reported here could be applied to other layered materials to obtain the single crystals that otherwise are difficulty to grow.
4. Experimental Section/Methods
Experimental details are provided in the Supporting Information.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Project (Grant No. Z211100004821004), the Special Project on Transfer and Conversion of Scientific and Technological Achievements of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. KFJ-HGZX-042). We thank YS from Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOP, CAS) for the single crystal XRD measurement; SJ from IOP, CAS for the discussion of the single-crystal XRD results; QZ from IOP, CAS for the help of TEM measurements; ZZ, GZ, LY and CP from Beijing Lattice Semiconductor Co., Ltd. for technical help.