Figure 3: Atomic energies and volume distributions in amorphous GeTe samples.
The models are obtained from SiTe (grey), GeSe (light magenta) and SnTe (violet) parent structures by chemical substitution and annealing. Each point corresponds to an atom in the structures, whose environment is characterized by an order parameter Pi, which can distinguish the different local structural motifs (see Supplementary Note 3 and Supplementary Fig. 4). Note the opposite direction of the x-axes in the two plots, so that the local structural relaxation proceeds from left to right in both. Black curves are parabolic fits to the data. Top panels: atomic energies. Bottom panels: atomic volumes calculated using a Voronoï tessellation analysis. The energy trends clearly indicate that GeIII and TeIII should be predominant in relaxed amorphous structures.
