Phase and grain size engineering in Ge-Sb-Te-O by alloying with La-Sr-Mn-O towards improved material properties

Ge-Sb-Te alloys are promising materials for non-volatile memory applications. Alloying of the materials with var-ious elements is considered as prospective approach to enhance material properties. This work reports on the preparation and characterization of pure Ge-Sb-Te-O (GSTO) and alloyed with La-Sr-Mn-O (LSMO) thin films. Thermal heating of amorphous thin films to different temperatures show distinct crystallization behavior. A gen-eral trend is the decrease in the size of GSTO crystallites and the suppression in the formation of stable trigonal GSTO phase with increasing content of LSMO. Microstructural studies by transmission electron microscopy show the formation of metastable GSTO nanocrystallites dispersed in the amorphous matrix. Analysis of local chemical bonding by X-ray spectroscopy reveal the presence of different oxides in the GSTO-LSMO composites. Moreover, the composites with a high LSMO content exhibit higher crystallization temperature and significant larger sheet resistance in amorphous and crystalline phase, while a memory device made of GSTO-LSMO alloy reveals bipolar switching and synaptic behavior. In addition, the amount of LSMO in GSTO-LSMO thin films influ-ences their optical properties and band gap. Overall, the results of this work reveal the highly promising potential of GSTO-LSMO nanocomposites for data storage and reconfigurable photonic applications as well as neuro-inspired computing. (c) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Ge-Sb-Te alloys are promising materials for non-volatile memory applications, and alloying with elements enhances material properties. The nanocomposites GSTO-LSMO show potential for data storage and photonic applications.