Effects of pressure on the electrical conductivity of chalcogenide glasses

The effects of hydrostatic pressure (to ∼2.4 GPa) on the electrical conductivity of AsTe, AsTeI and AsTeGe bulk semiconducting glasses have been determined. The electrical conductivity σ increases nearly exponentially with increasing pressure P. The Δ 1n σ/ ΔP values are dependent upon composition and pressure, and vary from about 2 to 6 GPa −1. This is a narrow range of values considering that the initial conductivies vary over five orders of magnitude for the compositions studied. Many of the glasses exhibited time-dependent conductivity changes both at high pressure and after cycling to high pressure. At high pressure the conductivity drifted to higher values over a period of several hours, initially following a logarithmic time dependence. Generally, the drifts were observed for P ≳ 0.8 GPa and for σ ≳ 10 t-1 (Ω- m) −1 . Following the high-pressure experiment, the conductivity (and also the density) of some glasses were above that for the as-prepared material. These same samples had a slightly different conductivity temperature dependence. The conductivity slowly relaxed (over many months) toward the original conductivity state, again initially following a logarithmic time dependence. Much of our data can be interpreted consistently if we assumed that the conductivity changes depend primarily on “expected” volume changes. The kinds of behavior reported here are similar to those observed for a wide variety of glass systems. Any models developed for describing electrical transport under pressure must account for time-dependent as well as pressure-dependent effects.