Synthesis and nanoscale thermal encoding of phase-change nanowires

Low-dimensional phase-change nanostructures provide a valuable research platform for understanding the phase-transition behavior and thermal properties at nanoscale and their potential in achieving superdense data storage. Ge2Sb2Te5 nanowires have been grown using a vapor-liquid-solid technique and shown to exhibit distinctive properties that may overcome the present data storage scaling barrier. Local heating of an individual nanowire with a focused electron beam was used to shape a nano-bar-code on a Ge2Sb2Te5 nanowire. The data encoding on Ge2Sb2Te5 nanowire may promote novel device concepts to implement ultrahigh density, low energy, high speed data storage using phase-change nanomaterials with diverse thermal-programing strategies. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.