Crystal growth and materials in Brazil

This School, held in July, 1999 at the State U. of Campinas, SP-Brazil was organized by the Sociedade Brasileira de Crescimento des Cristais (SBCC) (R. Caram, U. of Campinas, and S. Baldochi, U. of Sao Paulo), and the IUCr Commission on Crystal Growth and Characterisation of Materials. The SBCC was founded in 1993 and has held national schools in this field in order to establish and develop the young Brazilian crystal growth community.

The majority of the 90 young scientists participated in the School came from Brazil with smaller groups from Argentinia and Uruguay.Lecture titles included: Thermodynamic Fundamentals (P. Rudolph, Germany), Course of Thermal Analysis (S. Gama, Brazil), Cellular and Dendritic Growth (O. Mesquita/Brazil), Interface Kinetics (P. Rudolph/Germany), Growth of Compound Semiconductors from Melt (R. Fornari/Italy), Oxide Crystal Growth (T. Fukuda/Japan), Solution Growth (H. Klapper/Germany), Transmission Electron Microscopy (D. Ugarte/Brazil), Modelling of Heat and Mass Transfer (F. Dupret/Belgium), Kinetics of Glass Formation (E.D. Zanotto/Brazil), Protein Crystal Growth (K. Balzuweit/Brazil), Crystal Growth for New Future Functional Devices (T. Fukuda/Japan), Elementary Growth Process of MBE (T. Nishinaga/Japan), Defect Characterization and X-Ray Topography (H. Klapper/Germany), Vapour Phase Epitaxy of GaN for Blue LEDs and Lasers (R. Fornari, Italy), Atomic-Force Microscopy (N.B. Costa/Brazil) and Microchannel Epitaxy (T. Nishinaga/Japan).

There were excursions to the Crystal Growth Laboratories of the Universities of Campinas and Sao Paulo, the National Synchroton Light Laboratory (with a 1.37 GeV electron storagering) and the National Laboratory of Electron Microscopy, near Campinas U. The laboratories are supported by the Brazil Ministry of Science and Technology and offer free use of their experimental facilities to users from all parts of the world.

A Proceedings was distributed and a poster session featured the work of the participants. The School was a great scientific success due to the excellent organization and the eager cooperation of the young participants.

Helmut Klapper, Rubens Caram