Preparation and Electrical Properties of V₂O₃ Single Crystals of Controlled Stoichiometry

V2O3 crystals have been grown by the skull-melting technique and subsequently annealed in CO2/CO atmosphere to produce crystals of controlled stoichiometry. Crystals were characterized by x-ray Laue back-reflection photography, lattice parameter refinement, polarized reflected light microscopy, neutron and gamma ray diffraction, and thermogravimetric analysis. Deviations from strict stoichiometry, V2-yO3, were found to follow the relation y ~ fo23/4 in the dependence on oxygen fugacity. The dependence of electrical resistivity on temperature was measured for two different samples, and the variation of the temperature of metal-insulator transition with sample composition was determined. © 1981, The Electrochemical Society, Inc. All rights reserved.