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The World Scientific Reference of Amorphous Materials: Structure, Properties, Modeling and Main Applications (In 3 Volumes)
This volume is dedicated to amorphous chalcogenides, namely, chalcogenide glasses and phase-change alloys. The observation by B T Kolomiets and N A Goryunova in the mid-1950s of semiconducting properties of chalcogenide glasses opened a new field in the physics of semiconductors: amorphous semiconductors. This discovery was highly unexpected since, until then, is was believed that the presence of the forbidden energy gap, characteristic of semiconductors, was a consequence of the presence of long-range crystalline order, which is, by definition, absent in glasses. Phase-change alloys comprise materials whose properties exhibit a pronounced property contrast between the amorphous and crystalline phases. These materials are widely used in optical memories (from CDs to BluRay discs) and now also in the latest generation of non-volatile electronic memory recently commercialized by Micron and Intel under the trade name of Optane. The volume consists of three part, where we tried to keep balance between basic and applied aspects of amorphous chalcogenides.