Oriented surface nucleation in diopside glass

Oriented surface crystallization on polished diopside glass surfaces has been studied with scanning electron microscopy, electron backscatter diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and laser scanning microscopy. An orientation preference of [001] parallel to the glass surface was detected for separately growing diopside crystals even as small as 700 nm in size. This finding shows that crystal orientation occurs in the outermost surface layer without crystal-crystal interaction and indicates that the crystal orientation is a result of oriented nucleation. Depending on surface preparation, monomodal crystal orientation distributions with [100] perpendicular to the surface or bimodal distributions with [100] and [010] perpendicular to the glass surface were detected. It was also shown that the degree of crystal orientation increases with decreasing surface roughness. The observed orientation of diopside crystals could be explained in terms of the interfacial energies of different crystal faces.