Joint Physical Chemistry and Electrical Engineering Seminar

Monday, September 24th
Professor Matthias Wuttig
"Towards Universal Memories? Exploring the Potential of Phase Change Materials"


4:15pm - 5:15pm
SPECIAL LOCATION
CISX Auditorium
Stanford University





This seminar is free and open to the public. All Stanford University Chemistry students are encouraged to attend this special event.

About the Seminar:
Phase change media are among the most promising materials in information technology. There are already employed in rewriteable optical data storage, where the pronounced difference of optical and electrical properties between the amorphous and crystalline state is used for data storage. This unconventional class of materials is also the basis of a storage concept to replace flash memory. In this talk the relevant material properties of phase change media will be discussed together with unsolved scientific issues and the potential of phase change based storage concepts. It will be demonstrated that only a small group of covalent semiconductors with octahedral coordination has the required unconventional property combination of high optical and electrical contrast and fast crystallization kinetics. The origin of this pronounced stoichiometry and structure dependence will be explained on the basis of advanced computations and a variety of experiments.

About Wuttig:
Prof. Wuttig received the PhD from the University of Aachen (RWTH), Germany in 1988. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences, RWTH University of Technology Aachen, Germany. The list of honors include:

1979: Prize of the city of Velbert for the best High School Exam
1988: Friedrich-Wilhelm Prize of RWTH Aachen for outstanding achievements within the Ph.D. thesis
1993: Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the Ministry for Education and Science for "Chemistry and Physics of thin films and layer systems"
1995: Gaede-Prize of the German Vacuum Society
2007: Stanford R. Ovshinsky Prize


Questions
Please contact Patricia Dwyer at 650-723-4770.