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Updated: Jun 24, 2026

Electric-field Control of Electronic States in WS2 Nanodevices by Electrolyte Gating
Published on: April 12, 2018
Void formation induced electrical switching in phase-change nanowires
Stefan Meister1, David T Schoen, Mark A Topinka
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
Abstract:
Solid-state structural transformation coupled with an electronic property change is an important mechanism for nonvolatile information storage technologies, such as phase-change memories. Here we exploit phase-change GeTe single-nanowire devices combined with ex situ and in situ transmission electron microscopy to correlate directly nanoscale structural transformations with electrical switching and discover surprising results. Instead of crystalline-amorphous transformation, the dominant switching mechanism during multiple cycling appears to be the opening and closing of voids in the nanowires due to material migration, which offers a new mechanism for memory. During switching, composition change and the formation of banded structural defects are observed in addition to the expected crystal-amorphous transformation. Our method and results are important to phase-change memories specifically, but also to any device whose operation relies on a small scale structural transformation.
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