Search Results
Formation of resonant bonding during growth of ultrathin GeTe films
2017, Wang, Ruining, Zhang, Wei, Momand, Jamo, Ronneberger, Ider, Boschker, Jos E., Mazzarello, Riccardo, Kooi, Bart J., Riechert, Henning, Wuttig, Matthias, Calarco, Raffaella
A highly unconventional growth scenario is reported upon deposition of GeTe films on the hydrogen passivated Si(111) surface. Initially, an amorphous film forms for growth parameters that should yield a crystalline material. The entire amorphous film then crystallizes once a critical thickness of four GeTe bilayers is reached, subsequently following the GeTe(111)
Metal - Insulator transition driven by vacancy ordering in GeSbTe phase change materials
2016, Bragaglia, Valeria, Arciprete, Fabrizio, Zhang, Wei, Mio, Antonio Massimiliano, Zallo, Eugenio, Perumal, Karthick, Giussani, Alessandro, Cecchi, Stefano, Boschker, Jos Emiel, Riechert, Henning, Privitera, Stefania, Rimini, Emanuele, Mazzarello, Riccardo, Calarco, Raffaella
Phase Change Materials (PCMs) are unique compounds employed in non-volatile random access memory thanks to the rapid and reversible transformation between the amorphous and crystalline state that display large differences in electrical and optical properties. In addition to the amorphous-to-crystalline transition, experimental results on polycrystalline GeSbTe alloys (GST) films evidenced a Metal-Insulator Transition (MIT) attributed to disorder in the crystalline phase. Here we report on a fundamental advance in the fabrication of GST with out-of-plane stacking of ordered vacancy layers by means of three distinct methods: Molecular Beam Epitaxy, thermal annealing and application of femtosecond laser pulses. We assess the degree of vacancy ordering and explicitly correlate it with the MIT. We further tune the ordering in a controlled fashion attaining a large range of resistivity. Employing ordered GST might allow the realization of cells with larger programming windows.
Structural, electronic and kinetic properties of the phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 in the liquid state
2016, Schumacher, Mathias, Weber, Hans, Jóvári, Pál, Tsuchiya, Yoshimi, Youngs, Tristan G.A., Kaban, Ivan, Mazzarello, Riccardo
Phase-change materials exhibit fast and reversible transitions between an amorphous and a crystalline state at high temperature. The two states display resistivity contrast, which is exploited in phase-change memory devices. The technologically most important family of phase-change materials consists of Ge-Sb-Te alloys. In this work, we investigate the structural, electronic and kinetic properties of liquid Ge2Sb2Te5 as a function of temperature by a combined experimental and computational approach. Understanding the properties of this phase is important to clarify the amorphization and crystallization processes. We show that the structural properties of the models obtained from ab initio and reverse Monte Carlo simulations are in good agreement with neutron and X-ray diffraction experiments. We extract the kinetic coefficients from the molecular dynamics trajectories and determine the activation energy for viscosity. The obtained value is shown to be fully compatible with our viscosity measurements.