Sapphire shaped crystals for waveguiding, sensing and exposure applications

Second half of the XX century was marked by a rapid development of sapphire shaped crystal growth technologies, driven by the demands for fast, low-cost, and technologically reliable methods of producing sapphire crystals of complex shape. Numerous techniques of shaped crystal growth from a melt have been proposed relying on the Stepanov concept of crystal shaping. In this review, we briefly describe the development of growth techniques, with a strong emphasize on those that yield sapphire crystals featuring high volumetric and surface quality. A favorable combination of physical properties of sapphire (superior hardness and tensile strength, impressive thermal conductivity and chemical inertness, high melting point and thermal shock resistance, transparency to electromagnetic waves in a wide spectral range) with advantages of shaped crystal growth techniques (primarily, an ability to produce sapphire crystals with a complex geometry of cross-section, along with high volumetric and surface quality) allows fabricating various instruments for waveguiding, sensing, and exposure technologies. We discuss recent developments of high-tech instruments, which are based on sapphire shaped crystals and vigorously employed in biomedical and material sciences, optics and photonics, nuclear physics and plasma sciences.