Regensburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten

DS 10: Thermoelectric and Phase Change Materials

DS 10.1: Vortrag

Montag, 1. April 2019, 16:45–17:00, H39

Switching behaviour of epitaxial Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films — •Mario Behrens, Andriy Lotnyk, Jürgen W. Gerlach, and Bernd Rauschenbach — Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (IOM), Permoserstraße 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

Phase change materials represent a promising material class with applications in various fields such as photonics, data storage and neuromorphic computing. The unique characteristic of these materials is a pronounced electrical and optical property contrast between different phases combined with the possibility to switch between these phases fast and reversibly. One of the most prominent phase change materials is the Te-based chalcogenide Ge2Sb2Te5 which has been intensively studied due to its well-balanced switching properties. A promising approach to gain deeper knowledge of the material properties is to employ epitaxially grown thin films, since it enables precise control of the structure and the phase and furthermore allows studies presupposing single-crystalline orientation. In this work, the switching behaviour of epitaxial Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films grown on Si(111) substrates by pulsed laser deposition is investigated. X-ray diffraction and aberration-corrected high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy studies of the thin films before and after switching demonstrate that phase transitions between different crystalline phases can be achieved without losing the epitaxial framework of the structures. These results therefore offer valuable insights into the switching processes of epitaxial phase change materials and might help to advance the design of phase change memories by employing highly textured structures.