Epitaxial growth of thin film materials has numerous applications in electronics, optoelectronic and magneto-optics. Growth can occur in severla ways, the most common being vapor phase epitaxy, where atoms for deposition on the substrate come from vapor and growth occurs at the gaseous/solid interface. Solid phase epitaxy deposits a thin non-crystalline film on the substrate which is then heated to form a crystalline layer, while liquid phase epitaxy sees layers grown from a liquid source.

The latter is by far the cheapest and easiest route for producing device quality layers, but metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) are growing in use. Initial costs are expensive but MOCVD and MBE are more versatile and can readily produce multilayer structures with atomic-layer control, which is fundamental to the nanoengineering now required to produce device structures in as-grown multilayers.

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