Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme
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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten
DS 13: Poster
DS 13.62: Poster
Thursday, March 20, 2025, 18:00–20:00, P1
Resolving crystalline domains in an amorphous matrix via APT — •Elias Hildebrand1, Jan Köttgen1, Ramon Pfeiffer1, Yuan Yu1, and Matthias Wuttig1,2 — 1I. Institute of Physics (IA), RWTH Aachen University, Germany — 2Peter Grünberg Institute - JARA-Institute Energy Efficient Information Technology (PGI-10), Jülich, Germany
Controlling crystallization from the amorphous state is critical for the development of new energy-efficient, non-volatile data storage technologies. The direct observation of crystalline nuclei is a challenging task because they are undetectable using classical X-ray diffraction.
In recent years, atom probe tomography (APT) has been established as an analytical technique for studying the microscopic structure of materials. Furthermore, it has been shown that for some chalcogenide materials (i.e., metavalently bonding materials), the difference between their amorphous and crystalline phases can be observed directly in APT data by utilizing the Probability of Multiple Events (PME).
In this project, APT is used to characterize amorphous and crystalline domains on a microscopic scale. The samples are produced using an in-house switching setup (the Phase Change Optical Tester) to reliably create crystalline regions within an amorphous matrix.
With this combination of techniques, we aim to achieve a better understanding of the crystallization mechanisms in chalcogenide glasses. This novel approach may help bridge the gap left by XRD measurements for small nuclei and thus improve control over crystallization and understanding of nucleation and growth on a nanometer scale.
Keywords: Atom Probe Tomography; Phase Change; Crystallization; metavalent bonding