This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. If so it would cut the cost of silicon solar cells significantly (a big chunk of their cost is the cost of the ingot, the ingot cost is a function of time to produce, producing them quickly would get more ingots per unit time from a given reactor). Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for thing…
> This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. No really. The way we grow silicon crystals is already very efficient and would not be improved by this sort of thing. We grow them by pulling a seed (in carefully controlled conditions, with a bit of twisting and other tweaks, but still), adding dissolutions steps would waste a lot of time. Besides, the defects they ge…
One interesting remaining unsolved problem is highly homogenous doping. Such silicon is needed for very high-current and high-voltage switching (like invertors on large wind turbines or HVDC power lines).
Creating it is so hard that we have to use FREAKING NUKES.
Seriously, a chunk of pure silicon is irradiated by neutrons in a reactor, transmuting some silicon atoms into phosphorus. It's apparently the only way to do it, which has always seemed wild to me.