Shilpa Guptaa, Animesh Agarwalb and Manish Saxenab
The activation energy plays a dominant role in deciding the utility of the material for the specific purpose - here storage. Chalcogenide glasses have been investigated intensively because of their promising technological applications in reversible phase change optical recording. The dependence of the crystalline temperature (Tc) and the peak temperature of crystallization (Tp) on the composition and heating rate (β) has been studied in the present work. From the heating rate dependence Tp, the activation energy for crystallization (Ec) has been evaluated. The activation energy Ec, calculated using three different approaches is found to increase with the increase in Te content. This analysis helps in finding the suitability of an alloy to be used in phase transition optical memories / switches. The results have been analyzed using Kissinger’s equation and Marseglia’s theory for non-isothermal crystallization of materials.
