Journal
APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS
Volume 117, Issue 21, Pages -Publisher
AIP Publishing
DOI: 10.1063/5.0032573
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [17H06124, 17H06088, 18H04288, 20H00326, 20H05662]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [18H04288, 20H05662, 20H00326] Funding Source: KAKEN
Ask authors/readers for more resources
A scanning probe microscope coupled with either femtosecond laser pulses or terahertz pulses holds great promise not only for observing ultrafast phenomena but also for fabricating desirable structures at the nanoscale. In this study, we demonstrate that a few-nanometer-scale phase change can be non-thermally stored on the Ge2Sb2Te5 surface by a laser-driven scanning tunneling microscope (STM). An atomically flat Ge2Sb2Te5 surface was irradiated with the optical near-field generated by introducing femtosecond laser pulses to the STM tip-sample junction. The STM topographic images showed that few-nanometer-scale mounds appeared after irradiation. In addition, tunneling conductance spectra showed that the bandgap increased by 0.2eV in the area of 5x5nm(2). These indicate that the nanoscale crystal-to-amorphous phase change was induced by the STM-tip-induced near field. Our approach presented here offers an unprecedented increase in the recording density of optical storage devices and is, therefore, expected to facilitate the development of next-generation information technology.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available