Study on some characteristics of KDP crystals grown by Sankaranarayanan-Ramasamy (SR) and conventional technique

Sankaranarayanan-Ramasamy (SR) is a technique of crystal growth in an aqueous solution proposed in the year of 2005. SR technique included the Y-shaped solution vessel and the crystal seed at the bottom of the vessel in order to grow a single crystal unidirectionally, which is contrary to conventional technique. This technique has many advantages over conventional technique, such as high-quality grown crystals, the absence of spontaneous crystalline clusters at the bottom of the vessel which make the growth of main single crystal slower, and effective control of growth direction. In this study, Potassium Dihydrogen Phosphates (KDP) crystals were grown by the temperature lowering method with SR technique and conventional technique. The KDP crystals were characterized by Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy, Fouriertransform infrared (FT-IR) analysis, X-Ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, and measurement of second harmonic generation (SHG) efficiency and nonlinear doubling coefficient. These properties of SR technique grown KDP crystals were compared to conventional ones, that showed the superiority of the new technique.