Electrical properties and microscopic structure of amorphous chalcogenides

The quantitative description of conduction in amorphous chalcogenides is one of the major challenges in modeling phase change memory (PCM) devices. The disordered phase is characterized by a spatially dependent band-structure, which also changes with time driven by the spontaneous relaxation toward more energetically favorable configurations. The work reviews some recent models of amorphous conduction that, accounting for the essential features of this changing energy landscape and consistently explaining the experimental results as well as their statistical dependences.