Enhanced Crystallization of GeTe from an Sb2Te

R. E. Simpson, P. Fons, A. V. Kolobov, M. Krbal, and J. Tominaga Nanodevice Innovation Research Center, National Institute of Applied Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba Central 4, 1-1-1 Higashi, Tsukuba 305-8562, Japan † Abstract Crystalline Sb 2Te 3 templates reduce the crystallization time of the phase change material GeTe by four orders of magnitude to 20 ns. Structural measurements and molecular dynamics atomistic modeling show that this reduction is a direct consequence of textured crystal growth from a plane of octahedral crystal nucleation centers. The nucleation template serves to reduce the crystallization activation energy by 2.6 eV allowing crystallization to proceed at a temperature 95 C lower than that of the untemplated GeTe lm.