Thin films of polyethyleneimine-stabilized Sb2S3 are prepared via electrophoretic deposition (EPD), showing strong adhesion between deposited layers and underlying substrate, with the films being crystallized via annealing. For amorphous films, thicknesses can be freely tuned from 0.2-1 μm, shrinking to 0.1-0.5 μm when crystallized, whilst retaining a crack-and defect-free surface, thus not impacting on their good stability, and maintaining their optical properties. Through UV-Vis spectroscopy and subsequent modelling of the obtained spectra, it was concluded that the materials after annealing showed a reduced band gap and a demonstrably increased refractive index (n) and carrier concentration. The use of EPD for this material shows the viability of rapidly creating stable thin films of phase-change materials.

The crystal structure of Nowotny chimney-ladder phase FeGe γ with γ ≈ 1.52 was studied by X-ray diffractometry from 300 K to 850 K. The diffraction patterns were fitted by Rietveld refinement considering an incommensurate composite crystal structure. The refined crystal structure of FeGe γ is described in details and compared to MnSi γ , a thermoelectric material with γ ≈ 1.74. The lattice parameters a, c Fe and c Ge were found to increase with the temperature following a polynomial law, while the modulation vector component γ remained constant up to the peritectoid decomposition into FeGe and FeGe 2 . Within the temperature range considered, the linear and volumetric thermal expansion parameters increased from about 3×10 −6 K −1 to 10×10 −6 K −1 and from 9.6×10 −6

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