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Krazy Krystal Laboratory Facts and Cool Details

Well, we love crystals and good vegetables, and there's nothing quite like growing your own. This is a crystal growing kit like no other. You'll be making solutions saturated with dry stuff. You'll be growing crystals from "seeds" by un-watering them. You'll be floating rocks on liquids, not to mention growing chemical trees and having salt battles.

The Chemistry

We use a chemical called monoammonium phosphate. It is used in fertilizers and baking bread to help yeast grow. The great thing about this chemical is the wonderful crystals it makes. If you make a warm solution that cannot dissolve any more chemical in it, we call it a saturated solution. This solution will produce crystals in a dish as it cools down and as water evaporates from our special crystal grower's paper.
New crystals need to grow on something. That something can be a speck of dust, a scratch on a plastic rock, an extra tiny crystal called a seed crystal, or fibers of crystal grower's paper.
We have included a split dish. What happens if you grow a card tree with roots in two different colors of chemical? Or in two different chemicals – our chemical and table salt for instance?

The Physics

Our chemical makes a very dense solution, denser than plain water. When it is saturated, it is so dense that our plastic rock will float! The rock tells us when the solution is the right strength. It is what you might call a density indicator.
When you scratch the rock, you provide areas for nucleation to happen. The scratches are places where seed crystals can form and grow.
The saturated liquid will climb up our crystal grower's card by capillary action. There are tiny airspaces between the fibers and the fibers are what we call "wettable," that is, watery liquids are attracted to them and have room to climb up the fibers.
The surface of the card may look smooth, but under a microscope it is very rough with an amazingly big surface area. The large surface area means that water evaporates very quickly, and there are lots of places for chemical to nucleate.
The photo to the right shows a supersaturated solution in which crystals have begun to grow.

A WILD Career
Now, you may be thinking what has this to do with real life science? Our answer – a ton! The science of crystal growing is at the heart of almost every computer chip. Silicon crystals are grown and sliced into wafers, which are then polished and then tiny electronic circuits are placed on them. Quartz crystals are grown for hi-tech clocks and timers. Photonic crystals may one day revolutionize computers and are already used in special color change paints and inks. The future is very bright for crystal growers, and you can get a glittering start right here... just for fun!

Additional Experiments

Rainbow color: we haven't done this yet, but we think it should be possible to grow a blue crystal inside a yellow or clear one. Any ideas?
Slip and stick: if you rub crystal grower's card with sandpaper, the card surface becomes fluffy. The crystals seem to grow faster here. But if you use a wax crayon on other parts of the card, nothing grows there. So any ideas for some amazing Crystal Paintings?

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