Crystallization properties of amorphous and supercooled liquid antimony

Chalcogenide phase change materials are highly important for technological applications in data storage and neuro-inspired computing devices, which exploit the ability of these materials to undergo fast and reversible transitions between crystalline and amorphous states with pronounced electrical contrast. Antimony alloys form an important family of phase-change materials. Recent work has shown that even pure antimony can be employed in phase-change devices, in spite of its high proneness to crystallization. In this talk, we investigate the structural and crystallization properties of amorphous and supercooled liquid models of pure and alloyed antimony by ab initio molecular dynamics. We study the effects of quenching rate and finite size on the crystallization speed and elucidate how the dopants affect the short-range order and the crystallization kinetics.