Patterned glycine crystals nucleated on functionalized metallic square islands. This approach can be used to fabricate particles with micron dimensions and screen solid forms under different conditions. The size of the glycine crystals is controlled by the dimensions of the islands. High energy metastable beta-glycine crystallizes on small metallic islands, whereas for large islands, the polymorphic outcome becomes biased toward the alpha-form.

Hollow needles can be produced by immersing certain hydrate crystals in alcohol solution (methanol or ethanol). The fact that these anhydrate needles are hollow was proven by confocal fluorescence microscopy. For one material (sodium 2-keto-l-gulonate anhydrate) it is shown here that the internal diameter can be controlled by changing the water content in the initial methanol solution. Interestingly, the internal diameter of sodium 2-keto-l-gulonate anhydrate needles can be decreased from about 4 μm to approximately 500 nm (ca. 88%) by increasing the water content in the alcohol phase.

Crystal growth is a process that only takes place under non-equilibrium conditions and a necessary prerequisite is that the crystal is exposed to a phase that is supersaturated in the material the crystal is composed of, be it a solution, a vapour or a supercooled melt. In industrial mass crystallization the growth rate for a population of crystals (in suspension growth processes [1]) rarely exceeds mean linear velocities of 10 -7 ms -1 . Here we present a mass crystallization process which is accompanied by rapid crystal growth several orders of magnitude faster and into a region of solution that is without inherent supersaturation. The material investigated is a solid hydrate that exhibits a solution mediated phase transition to its anhydrous form in the presence of methanol [2]. The phase transition is initiated simply by placing an amount of hydrate crystals into the solvent and is characterized by the rapid emergence of needle-shaped crystals. The needles emanate from the crystal faces of the hydrate crystals and grow into the solution, which is nominally free of the substance to be crystallized. The high growth rate of the crystals, which of the order of up to 10 -4 ms -1 is surprising. Although rapid needle growth has been observed before [3][4][5][6][7][8][9], to date a satisfactory explanation for needles growing under the abovementioned conditions is still outstanding. Based upon the topology of the crystals we propose a tentative mechanism for this phenomenon capable of explaining the unusually rapid growth and highlight those questions that need addressing in order to verify this mechanism. X-ray powder diffraction is used to characterize the crystal phase of the needles; confocal fluorescence microscopy reveals that the needles are hollow. The width of these needles is between 0.5 and 5 µm, their length appears to be limited only by the amount of hydrate available for their formation.

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