We report the fabrication of nanoparticle silver oxide thin films by rf magnetron sputtering and characterization of their nonlinear optical properties. The chemical decomposition and reversibility of AgO x compounds were studied by thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, and x-ray diffraction. Electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis measurements revealed a 0.5 eV negative binding energy shift from AgO to Ag 2 O phase. The effect of particle plasmon resonance was confirmed by the absorption band shift with increased Ag 2 O particle size. The measured third-order nonlinear susceptibility (3 ϭ3.4ϫ10 Ϫ7 esu) and response time ͑27 ps͒ of the Ag 2 O nanoparticles makes it promising for applications in all-optical switching devices and optical data storage systems.

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The crystallization process of two types of phase change materials (Ge2Sb2Te5 and AgInSbTe) has been studied by in-situ annealing experiments in the column of a transmission electron microscope. Under the same heating rate (7.5KIs), the Ge2Sb2Te5 material starts to nucleate at 170 °C, while AgInSbTe starts to nucleate at 250 °C. The measured nucleation rate of Ge2Sb2Te5 is 8.2x10'4cm3s1 larger than nucleation rate of AgInSbTe (3.5x1014cm3s').By studying the partially crystallized samples, we found that homogeneous nucleation is dominant for both Ge2Sb2Te5 and AgInSbTe with ZnS-Si02 as the dielectric layer in the thinned samples.

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