Nonthermal Transport of Energy Driven by Photoexcited Carriers in Switchable Solid States of

Phase-change alloys have seen widespread use, from rewritable optical disks to current interest in their use in emerging neuromorphic computing architectures. In spite of this enormous commercial interest, the physics of the carriers in these materials is still not fully understood. Here, we describe the time and space dependence of the coupling between photoexcited carriers and the lattice in both the amorphous and crystalline states of one phase-change material, . We study this material using a time-resolved optical technique called the picosecond acoustic method to investigate the in situ thermally assisted amorphous-to-crystalline phase transformation in . Our work reveals a clear evolution of electron-phonon coupling during the phase transformation, as the spectra of photoexcited acoustic phonons in the amorphous (-) and crystalline (-) phases are different. In particular, and surprisingly, our analysis of the photoinduced acoustic pulse duration in crystalline suggests that part of the energy deposited during the photoexcitation process takes place over a distance that clearly exceeds that defined by the skin depth of the pump light. Alternatively, the photoexcitation process remains localized within that skin depth in the amorphous state. We then demonstrate that this is due to supersonic diffusion of photoexcited electron-hole plasma in the crystalline state. Consequently, these findings prove the existence of the nonthermal transport of energy, which is much faster than lattice heat diffusion.