Statistics of crystallization kinetics in nanoscale systems

초록

We investigate the statistics of the crystallization kinetics caused by the finite size of nanoscale samples. We define a characteristic length, L-C, as a function of the material properties, in order to describe the sample size dependence of the statistics. We find that the samples smaller than L-C undergo single-nucleus crystallization, which yields wide distributions of the half-transition time. Finally, we apply our theory to find a way to improve the data retention statistics of sub-20 nm phase-change memory. (C) 2014 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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