Crystallization behavior of Ge-doped eutectic Sb70Te30 films in optical disks

We report laser-induced crystallization behavior of binary Sb-Te and ternary Ge-doped eutectic Sb70Te30 thin film samples in a typical quadrilayer stack as used in phase-change optical disk data storage. Several experiments have been conducted on a two-laser static tester in which one laser operating in pulse mode writes crystalline marks on amorphous film or amorphous marks on crystalline film, while the second laser operating at low-power cw mode simultaneously monitors the progress of the crystalline or amorphous mark formation in real time in terms of the reflectivity variation. The results of this study show that the crystallization kinetics of this class of film is strongly growth dominant, which is significantly different from the crystallization kinetics of stochiometric Ge-Sb-Te compositions. In Sb-Te and Ge-doped eutectic Sb70Te30 thin-film samples, the crystallization behavior of the two forms of amorphous states, namely, as-deposited amorphous state and melt-quenched amorphous state, remains approximately same. We have also presented experiments showing the effect of the variation of the Sb/Te ratio and Ge doping on the crystallization behavior of these films. (C) 2002 Optical Society of America.