Annealing Temperature Dependent Ferromagnetic Behaviors Observed in Highly Orientated Pure NiO Thin Films

Abstract

Transition metal (TM) doped NiO is a promising candidate of p-type oxide diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMSs), which shows obvious room-temperature ferromagnetism. When researching the magnetic properties of DMSs, it is very important to get rid of ferromagnetic impurity phases by optimizing the preparation process. For this purpose, pure NiO thin films have been deposited by a pulsed laser deposition method and annealed by different annealing process. As-deposited or low-temperature annealed films show room-temperature ferromagnetism and high-temperature annealed films are not ferromagnetic. Nickel metal should be the origin of ferromagnetism in these thin films. On the other hand, high annealing temperature influences the microstructure of the film surface a lot. These results show a useful method to eliminate ferromagnetic impurity in NiO thin films and to optimize the preparation parameters of TM doped NiO thin films.