Rapid Phase Transition of Al2O3 Encapsulated MoTe2 via Thermal Annealing

Published

July 19, 2022

Author(s)

Rohan Sengupta, Saroj Dangi, Sergiy Krylyuk, Albert Davydov, Spyridon Pavlidis

Abstract

MoTe2 has gained a lot of attention recently as a potential phase change material candidate for low-power nonvolatile switches and high-density memory applications, due to the smallest predicted energy offset between its semiconducting 2H and semimetallic 1T' crystal structures. Here, we report fast, non-destructive and full phase change of Al2O3-encapsulated 2H-MoTe2 thin films to 1T'-MoTe2 using rapid thermal annealing at 900 °C. Phase change was confirmed using Raman spectroscopy after very short annealing duration of 10 s both in vacuum and nitrogen ambient. No thickness dependence of the transition temperatures was observed for flake thickness ranging from 1.5 nm to 8 nm. This is an important step towards evaluating the suitability of MoTe2 as a phase change material for designing devices for various electronic applications where external Joule heating can be used to obtain conductivity modulation.

Citation

Applied Physics Letters

Volume

121

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0097844

Local Download

Keywords

van der Waals materials, phase transition, rapid thermal annealing

Citation

Sengupta, R. , Dangi, S. , Krylyuk, S. , Davydov, A. and Pavlidis, S. (2022), Rapid Phase Transition of Al2O3 Encapsulated MoTe2 via Thermal Annealing, Applied Physics Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0097844, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=935019 (Accessed October 27, 2025)