Gallium Telluride Based Phase Change Materials for Neuromorphic Photonic Applications

Neuromorphic photonics intensively uses classical phase-change materials based on GeTe-Sb₂Te₃ (GST) composition line either to develop on-chip non-volatile photonic memories [1] or artificial synapses for complex integrated photonic systems capable of the image recognition [2]. The GST materials were originally designed for DVD and Blu-ray disks and not necessarily fully optimized for neuromorphic applications. As a possible alternative, we will present here structure and properties of gallium telluride based systems. The structural studies using hard x-rays and ab initio molecular dynamics modeling will be compared with corresponding results for GST phase-change alloys.

[1] C. Rios, M. Stegmaier, P. Hosseini, et al. Nature Photonics 9 (2015) 725.

[2] J. Feldmann, N. Youngblood, C. D. Wright, et al. Nature 569 (2019) 208.