Stabilizing amorphous Sb by adding alien seeds for durable memory materials.

The thermal stability of the amorphous phase is a key property of phase-change memory, which limits the data retention time and device reliability. The high thermal stability of memory devices enables their applications in harsh environments and under extreme conditions. Here, we discovered that the alloying of C, Si and Ge significantly improves the stability of amorphous Sb by adding "alien" tetrahedral seeds to the octahedral matrix.