Researchers from HUN-REN Wigner RCP (Ildikó Pethes and Pál Jóvári) are the lead authors of the study published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, titled 'Short-range order and topology of Te-rich amorphous Ge–Sb–Te alloys'."
The article discusses the atomic level structure of amorphous Ge-Sb-Te alloys obtained by thermal evaporation. The simultaneous interpretation of diffraction and X-ray absorption datasets reveals that the alloys are chemically ordered (germanium and antimony atoms bind to Te), and all components satisfy the 8-N rule (Ge, Sb and Te have 4, 3 and 2 nearest neighbors, respectively). A remarkable finding is that in amorphous Ge-Sb-Te alloys the environment of Ge atoms depends on the preparation
technique: while in case of thermal evaporation Ge atoms are in a tetrahedral environment, traits of octahedral Ge coordination can be observed in the alloys obtained by sputtering.
