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- Title
Highly tunable β-relaxation enables the tailoring of crystallization in phase-change materials.
- Authors
Cheng, Yudong; Yang, Qun; Wang, Jiangjing; Dimitriadis, Theodoros; Schumacher, Mathias; Zhang, Huiru; Müller, Maximilian J.; Amini, Narges; Yang, Fan; Schoekel, Alexander; Pries, Julian; Mazzarello, Riccardo; Wuttig, Matthias; Yu, Hai-Bin; Wei, Shuai
- Abstract
In glasses, secondary (β-) relaxations are the predominant source of atomic dynamics. Recently, they have been discovered in covalently bonded glasses, i.e., amorphous phase-change materials (PCMs). However, it is unclear what the mechanism of β-relaxations is in covalent systems and how they are related to crystallization behaviors of PCMs that are crucial properties for non-volatile memories and neuromorphic applications. Here we show direct evidence that crystallization is strongly linked to β-relaxations. We find that the β-relaxation in Ge15Sb85 possesses a high tunability, which enables a manipulation of crystallization kinetics by an order of magnitude. In-situ synchrotron X-ray scattering, dielectric functions, and ab-initio calculations indicate that the weakened β-relaxation intensity stems from a local reinforcement of Peierls-like distortions, which increases the rigidity of the bonding network and decreases the dynamic heterogeneity. Our findings offer a conceptually new approach to tuning the crystallization of PCMs based on manipulating the β-relaxations.The crystallization of phase-change materials is relevant to their applications in memory and neuromorphic computing devices. Cheng et al. show that the β-relaxation in Ge15Sb85 can be controlled by thermal annealing, leading to the tunability in its crystallization kinetics by one order of magnitude.
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2022, Vol 13, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-022-35005-x