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Epitaxial growth has always been a marriage of convenience between film and substrate. More and more frequently, however, it is impractical to use the same material for both film and substrate because it is not available as large single crystals, it is prohibitively expensive, or its properties are ill-suited for the intended application. To meet these challenges, many strategies have been pursued to achieve highly oriented or single-crystal thin films via epitaxy. Crystalline films have been mechanically bonded to other materials to form composite substrates. Crystals have been cut and rewelded, patterned and regrown, buffer layered and repolished. Each strategy has met with fundamental challenges including lattice mismatch, chemical incompatibility, differences in thermal expansion, and structural dissimilarity. This book, first published in 2000, focuses on developments in novel substrate engineering which enable improved epitaxy. Topics include: biaxially textured substrates for high-Tc-coated conductors; surfaces for oxide epitaxy; wafer bonding and lift off; lattice mismatch engineering; substrate engineering and solid-phase recrystallization and epitaxy.

One of the goals of materials science is to design alloys with pre-specified desirable technological properties. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying materials behavior. In particular, one must understand the effects on alloy properties caused by intentional changes in concentration and how the combinations of temperature, time and uncontrollable foreign impurities affect microstructure. In addition to the equilibrium phase information contained in phase diagrams, nonequilibrium dynamic processes and metastable phases are known to be crucial in determining materials properties. This volume brings together researchers working on various aspects of nonequilibrium processes in materials to discuss current research issues and to provide guidelines for future work. Particular attention was paid to understanding particle nucleation and growth, both experimentally and theoretically, solid-state reactions, nanosystems, liquid-solid transformations, and solidification and amorphization. On the theoretical side, fundamental principles governing nucleation and growth, and related phenomena such as coarsening and Ostwald ripening, are discussed. Progress is also reported on the phase field method and on Monte Carlo simulations.