Topological insulating behaviour in conducting property of crystalline Ge-Sb-Te

Abstract

We report a discovery, through first-principles calculations, that crystalline Ge-Sb-Te (GST) phase-change materials exhibit the topological insulating property. Our calculations show that the materials become topological insulator or develop conducting surface-like interface states depending on the layer stacking sequence. It is shown that the conducting interface states originate from topological insulating Sb2Te3 layers in GSTs and can be crucial to the electronic property of the compounds. These interface states are found to be quite resilient to atomic disorders but sensitive to the uniaxial strains. We presented the mechanisms that destroy the topological insulating order in GSTs and investigated the role of Ge migration that is believed to be responsible for the amorphorization of GSTs.

arXiv comment13 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Disordered Topological Insulators: A Non-Commutative Geometry Perspective
• Weak antilocalization and disorder-enhanced electron interactions in crystalline GeSbTe
• First-principles calculation of topological invariants Z2 within the FP-LAPW formalism
• Strain tuning of topological band order in cubic semiconductors
• Three-dimensional topological insulators: A review on host materials
• Evidence for topological band inversion of the phase change material Ge2Sb2Te5
• Zener Tunneling Breakdown in Phase-Change Materials Revealed by Intense Terahertz Pulses
• Topological states and phase transitions in Sb${}_2$Te${}_3$-GeTe multilayers
• Weyl node assisted conductivity switch in interfacial phase change memory with van der Waals interfaces
• Hybrid density functional study of electronic and optical properties of phase change memory material: $\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{e}}_2\mathrm{S}{\mathrm{b}}_2\mathrm{T}{\mathrm{e}}_5$
• Intrinsic ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic axion insulators in van der Waals materials Mn\emph{X}${}_2$\emph{B}${}_2$\emph{T}${}_6$ family
• A topological phase buried in a chalcogenide superlattice monitored by a helicity dependent Kerr measurement
• Strong and Weak Three-Dimensional Topological Insulators Probed by Surface Science Methods