The Mott Lecture is a traditional plenary speech at the ICANS, in the honor of Sir Nevill Mott, winner of the Nobel Physics prize in 1977. Sir Nevil Mott was one of the pioneers of the ICANS. 

This year's Mott Lecture will be given to Prof. Matthias Wuttig. The title of his lecture will be "Amorphous chalcogenides: a challenge for material science, an opportunity for memory technology and beyond".

Prof. Matthias Wuttig

Developing novel materials is the goal of Matthias Wuttig's work. In doing so, he relies on an unconventional approach, the development of 'treasure maps' to identify promising materials. This has enabled the identification of fundamental relationships between relevant material properties and the underlying chemical bonding mechanism. He is particularly interested in the design of materials for photonic applications, data storage and energy conversion.

After his PhD he spent time in Marseille, Tsukuba, Berkeley, Murray Hill (Bell Labs) and the Research center Jülich, before he moved to RWTH Aachen in 1997. There he was speaker of the Strategy Council, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences and has been the speaker of the Collaborative Research Center Nanoswitches since 2011. He has received various scientific awards and funding for his work, such as an ERC Advanced Grant and has published more than 400 papers (with about 25.000 citations (Web of Science)).

Amorphous chalcogenides: a challenge for material science, an opportunity for memory technology and beyond

Controlling a state of material between its crystalline and glassy phase has fostered many real-world applications including photonic switches and phase change materials. Nevertheless, design rules for crystallization and vitrification kinetics as well as the contrast of the corresponding optical properties still lack predictive power. Here, we identify stoichiometry trends for these processes in phase change materials, i.e. along the GeTe-GeSe, GeTe-SnTe, and GeTe-Sb2Te3 pseudo-binary lines employing a pump-probe laser setup and calorimetry. We discover a clear stoichiometry dependence of optical properties and crystallization speed along a line connecting regions characterized by two fundamental bonding types, metallic and covalent bonding. Increasing covalency slows down crystallization by six orders of magnitude and promotes vitrification. The stoichiometry dependence is correlated with material properties, such as the optical properties of the crystalline phase and a bond indicator, the number of electrons shared between adjacent atoms. A quantum-chemical map explains these trends and provides a blueprint to design crystallization kinetics and property contrast.

History of Mott Lecture

Mott Lecture (20:40-21:20, 23rd Aug，Sanjiang Lecture Hall (三江报告厅))

Research Home Page: http://www.physik-technik-ia.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract for Presentation

Biography