Impact of magnetic, thermal, structural, morphological and optical characteristics on room temperature ferromagnetism of pristine and cerium doped ZnO nanocomposites

Abstract

An excellent fit between the theoretical and experimental studies of the related to structure, optics, and magnetism features of pristine and cerium-modified Zn-O NPs prepared through the wet chemical technique. Refining the XR-D pattern using the Rietveld-method reveals that the samples have a hexagonal Wurtzite structure. Absorption spectra reveal a shrinking bandwidth gap as cerium doping increases, substantiating ce2+ ion's essential function in ZnO's spectral qualities. The narrowing of the bandwidth gap due to the presence of impurity states was also verified by first-principles calculations. The residual magnetization increases with Cerium doping, and magnetic tests show roomtemperature weak-ferromagnetism (RTFM). In addition, ferromagnetism for cerium doping is confirmed by both first-principles calculations and experiments. Theoretical calculations imply that the cerium atoms may agglomerate to generate metallicantiferromagnetic chromium oxide when cerium doping reaches 8%. At ambient temperature, however, ferromagnetic behaviour is feasible since both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic behaviour are degraded when cerium is widely disseminated throughout the lattice as revealed by XRD studies