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Structural disorder in the high-temperature cubic phase of GeTe

In traditional materials science, structural disorder tends to break the symmetry of the lattice. In this work, however, we studied a case which may be opposite to this intuition. The prototypical phase change material, GeTe, undergoes the phase transition from the rhombohedral structure to a more s...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Xu, Ming, Lei, Zhenyu, Yuan, Junhui, Xue, Kanhao, Guo, Yanrong, Wang, Songyou, Miao, Xiangshui, Mazzarello, Riccardo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society of Chemistry 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9080495/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35539235
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c8ra02561d
Descripción
Sumario:In traditional materials science, structural disorder tends to break the symmetry of the lattice. In this work, however, we studied a case which may be opposite to this intuition. The prototypical phase change material, GeTe, undergoes the phase transition from the rhombohedral structure to a more symmetric cubic one at ∼625 K. Using ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, we demonstrated that even in the cubic phase, the lattice is constructed by random short and long bonds, instead of bonds with a uniform length. Such bifurcation of the bond lengths enabled by Peierls-like distortion persists in the entire temperature range (0–900 K), yet with different degrees of disorder, e.g., the atoms are distorted along a certain direction in the rhombohedral phase (i.e., structural order) but the distortion varies stochastically in terms of direction and amplitude at high T (i.e., structural disorder). A more symmetric lattice frame coexisting with severe local structural disorder is the signature of this cubic GeTe. Our simulations have provided a theoretical support on the disordered Peierls-like distortion in the high-T cubic phase discovered earlier by X-ray experiments. By modulating the physical properties that different degrees of disorder may induce, we are able to design better functional materials for various applications in electronic and photonic devices.