Interest on crystal growth and characterization at the Department of Physics, West University of Timişoara began 40 years ago, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Mircea Zăgănescu. First crystals (alkali halides) have been obtained by Czochralski method using a set-up, designed by Dumitru Nicoară and built at our department. The second step was to build a Bridgman type set-up in order to obtain some metal crystals (Zn, Ni, Cu) and some alloys (Ni-Cu, Ni-Al, NiCuMn, etc.).

1964 - Czochralski set-up	NaCl crystal obtained by Czochralski method	1967 – First Bridgman set-up up to 1100 C in vacuum

The Crystal research laboratory - growth and characterization is part of the Physics Department of the West University of Timişoara. The main goal has been to design set-ups and elaborate technology to obtain and to characterize the crystals. During the time attention was focused on several objectives: to obtain various type of crystals, to characterize their physical properties and to use numerical simulation methods in order to optimize the crystals quality, and the set-ups details. Two crystal growth methods were especially developed: the vertical Bridgman technique and the Edge-defined Film-fed Growth method in order to obtain shaped crystals.