Dielectric relaxation in amorphous and crystalline Sb₂Te₃ thin films

Sb₂Te₃ is an endpoint of the GeTe-Sb₂Te₃ quasi-binary tie-line that represents phase-change alloys widely used in optical and non-volatile phase-change memory devices. In the crystalline form it is also a prototypical topological insulator with a layered structure where covalently bonded quintuple layers are held together by weak van der Waals forces. One of the ways to fabricate a crystalline phase is solid-state crystallization of an amorphous film, whereby the three-dimensional (3D) structure relaxes to the two-dimensional (2D) crystalline phase. The mechanism of the 3D-2D transformation remains unclear. In this work, we performed a study of relaxation processes in thin Sb₂Te₃ films in both amorphous and crystalline phases. We found that both phases possess two kinds of relaxators (type I and type II), where the type I fragments are identical in the two phases, while the relaxation of type II fragments are shifted to lower temperature in the amorphous phases. The activation energies of the associated relaxation processes and the values of the Havriliak–Negami parameters were determined. The differences between the relaxation processes in the two phases are discussed. The obtained result will contribute to better understanding of the 3D-2D transformation during the crystallization of van der Waals solids.