Crystallization kinetics of the phase change material GeSb6Te measured with dynamic transmission electron microscopy

GeSb6Te is a chalcogenide-based phase change material that has shown great ptoential for use in solid-state memory devices. The crystallization kinetics of amorphous thin films of GeSb6Te during laser crystallization were followed with dynamic transmission electron microscopy, a photo-emission electron microscopy technique with nanosecond-scale time resolution. Nine-frame movies of crystal growth were taken during laser crystallization. The nucleation rate is observed to be very low and the growth rates are very high, up to 10.8 m s(-1) for amorphous as-deposited films and significantly higher for an amorphous film subject to sub-threshold laser annealing before crystallization. The measured growth rates exceed any directly measured growth rate of a phase change material. The crystallization is reminiscent of explosive crystallization of elemental semiconductors both in the magnitude of the growth rate and in the resulting crystalline microstructures.