Compositionally Uniform SiGe Crystal Growth aboard the International Space Station (1) Hicari project summary

Abstract

We report the Hicari project summary, namely, history of the project, preparation of samples, preliminary experiments, determination of growth conditions, preparation for safety requirements, on orbit operations of the space experiments, results of the space grown SiGe crystals, lessons learned from the project and so on. In the series of experiments, the crystal growth parameters were adjusted by reflecting the results of the latest crystal growth experiment. We discuss two things; what is the best user integration process for the current JAXA materials science space experiments and the future work of the SiGe bulk crystal growth experiments.