Abstract
Chalcogenide Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films have been widely exploited as binary bit recording materials in optical and non-volatile electronic information storage, where the crystalline and amorphous states are marked as the information bits “0” and “1”, respectively. In this work, we demonstrate the use of Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films as multi-level grayscale image recording materials. High-resolution grayscale images are recorded on Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films through taking advantage of laser-induced structural evolution characteristic. Experimental results indicate that the change of laser energy results in the structural evolution of Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films. The structural evolution induces the difference of electronic polarizability and reflectivity, and high-resolution grayscale images are recorded on Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films through direct laser writing method, accordingly.
Highlights
The binary bit encoding is extensively exploited in traditional optical data storage[1]
For the purpose of achieving grayscale image recording on Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films, multi-level grayscale characteristics are obtained by tuning laser energy density
Results suggest that multi-level grayscale tones can be determined by finely tuning laser energy and Ge2Sb2Te5 thin film is a promising candidate material for grayscale image recording
Summary
Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films through laserinduced structural evolution received: 04 October 2016 accepted: January 2017 Published: February 2017. Chalcogenide Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films, possessing good thermal stability and large number of achievable rewriting cycles[6,7,8,9], have been successfully applied in binary bit encoding data storage by taking advantage of the optical reflectivity contrast between the crystalline and amorphous states induced by laser pulse radiation[6,10,11]. Multi-level bit encoding features can be generated only by tuning laser energy, and one can obtain the grayscale image recording on Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films through taking advantage of the laser-induced structural evolution. Arbitrary images such as tiger, dog and flowers have been successfully recorded on Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films by direct laser writing method
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