Abstract

Phase change materials have been found to be useful for many applications including phase change optical media, phase change memory, and probe storage. In order to increase density, bit size has been continuously shrunk. At the nano-scale, the extreme dimensional and nano-structural constraints and the large proportion of interfaces will cause the deviation of the phase change behavior from that of bulk. This work has systemically investigated the nano-phase change in terms of the materials’ different properties against the dimension. The future development trend beyond scaling limitation is discussed.

© 2011 Optical Society of America