Debdipto Acharya¹, Omar Abou El Kheir¹, Davide Campi¹, Marco Bernasconi^1*

1 Department of Materials Science, University of Milano-Bicocca, Via R. Cozzi 55, 20125, Milan, Italy

* Corresponding authors emails: marco.bernasconi@unimib.it

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:kb-wq [version v2]

Publication date: Feb 12, 2024

How to cite this record

Debdipto Acharya, Omar Abou El Kheir, Davide Campi, Marco Bernasconi, Crystallization kinetics of nanoconfined GeTe slabs in GeTe/TiTe-like superlattices for phase change memories, Materials Cloud Archive 2024.26 (2024), https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:kb-wq

Description

Superlattices made of alternating blocks of the phase change compound Sb₂Te₃ and of TiTe₂ confining layers have been recently proposed for applications in neuromorphic devices. The Sb₂Te₃/TiTe₂ heterostructure allows for a better control of multiple intermediate resistance states and for a lower drift with time of the electrical resistance of the amorphous phase. However, Sb₂Te₃ suffers from a low data retention due to a low crystallization temperature T_x. Substituting Sb₂Te₃ with a phase change compound with a higher T_x, such as GeTe, seems an interesting option in this respect. Nanoconfinement might, however, alters the crystallization kinetics with respect to the bulk. In this work, we investigated the crystallization process of GeTe nanoconfined in geometries mimicking GeTe/TiTe₂ superlattices by means of molecular dynamics simulations with a machine learning potential. The simulations reveal that nanoconfinement induces a mild reduction in the crystal growth velocities which would not hinder the application of GeTe/TiTe₂ heterostructures in neuromorphic devices with superior data retention.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
600.xyz MD5md5:c376f49409b998cd488e6c77ec78a5ac	100.7 MiB	Trajectory file of the confined crystallization at 600 K. The file contains the atomic positions and an atomic label that allows identifying crystalline atoms. The label ("Crys_label") is equal to one for crystalline atoms and is equal to zero for non-crystalline atoms.
700.xyz MD5md5:d146286cf08c56bc0ccb2439e1ea1fda	100.7 MiB	Trajectory file of the confined crystallization at 700 K. The file contains the atomic positions and an atomic label that allows identifying crystalline atoms. The label ("Crys_label") is equal to one for crystalline atoms and is equal to zero for non-crystalline atoms.
600.ovito MD5md5:31d82fae5f9a20dd366f00d5495960c1	211.4 KiB	Ovito session state with the same settings used for the visualization and for the cluster analysis used for the trajectory at 600 K.
700.ovito MD5md5:77facf353fb08aa48d877b99b9e17167	211.4 KiB	Ovito session state with the same settings used for the visualization and for the cluster analysis used for the trajectory at 700 K.
README.pdf MD5md5:cd951386525ebad87fb98d7e2ae7cc40	530.9 KiB	Instructions to open an ovito state file

License

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Metadata, except for email addresses, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.

External references

Keywords

Neural Network Potential Crystallization Phase Change Memories Phase Change Materials Molecular Dynamics Simulation GeTe Nanoconfinement Superlattices Neuromophic Computing