Growth of Fluoride Single Crystals for UV Solid-State Tunable Laser Applications

摘要

Fluoride single crystals are of particular importance for many applications, such as medical procedures, semiconductor processing, optical communications and remote sensing, since they can provide coherent optical sources in the UV wavelength regions. In this work, we have grown 2-inch size Ce doped LiCaAlF_6(LiCAF) single crystal by Czochralski(CZ) technique for the application to UV solid-state tunable lasers. We confirmed that excessive addition of LiF and AlF_3, more than 4mol percent, the limited solidification fraction of the melt, up to 65 percent, and using the automatic shape control system were very effective to suppress the generation of cracks and inclusions in grown crystals. Resultantly, adequate growth conditions were obtained concerning the reproduction of large size and high quality single crystals.