Ultra-high vacuum compatible induction-heated rod casting furnace
Abstract
We report the design of a radio-frequency induction-heated rod casting furnace that permits the preparation of polycrystalline ingots of intermetallic compounds under ultra-high vacuum compatible conditions. The central part of the system is a bespoke water-cooled Hukin crucible supporting a casting mold. Depending on the choice of mold, typical rods have a diameter between 6 mm and 10 mm and a length up to 90 mm, suitable for single-crystal growth by means of float-zoning. The setup is all-metal sealed and may be baked out. We find that the resulting ultra-high vacuum represents an important precondition for processing compounds with high vapor pressures under a high-purity argon atmosphere up to 3 bar. Using the rod casting furnace, we succeeded to prepare large high-quality single crystals of two half-Heusler compounds, namely the itinerant antiferromagnet CuMnSb and the half-metallic ferromagnet NiMnSb.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.00821,
title = {Ultra-high vacuum compatible induction-heated rod casting furnace},
author = {Andreas Bauer and Andreas Neubauer and Wolfgang Münzer and Alexander Regnat and Georg Benka and Martin Meven and Björn Pedersen and Christian Pfleiderer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.00821},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures