Polycrystalline silicon on glass substrates was grown by a method based on the creation of nucleation sites using laser crystallization of amorphous silicon followed by thermal annealing at temperatures below 600 °C. Annealing induces the crystallization of the material around the seeds, eventually leading to coalescence of adjacent domains before spontaneous nucleation sets in. Micro‐Raman spectroscopy shows that the seeds experience a tensile stress, which causes a radial birefringence in the surrounding amorphous silicon, detected by optical anisotropy measurements. We conjecture that this stress facilitates the crystallization of the material around the seed upon thermal annealing. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.