Magnetic and electric behavior of spike- and petal-like nanoscaled Cu:ZnO superstructures diluted magnetic semiconductors

Abstract

Room temperature ferromagnetism (RTFM) is the main condition for searching for materials to the application in spintronics. Beyond the candidates, the diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) are potential materials for such application. The introduction of a foreign transition metal ion in the semiconductor lattice may lead to the RTFM, where the intrinsic ferromagnetism developed by a nonmagnetic ion is preferable for spintronics application. In this work, single-phase Cu-substituted zinc oxide was synthesized by a fast polymeric precursor method, providing nanocrystallites from 4 to 11 nm. Copper hindered grain growth, even for high Cu concentrations. The crystallites assembled to superstructures with petal and spike-like morphologies, following an unconventional crystallization. The texturization observed during the crystallization led to the development of unexpected weak RTFM. The number of oxygen vacancies is too small to promote the RTFM since few atoms of copper find attached to the vacancies. Probably the RTFM arises from overlapped spin-split bound magnetic polarons (BMP) due to the interaction of the hybridized O 2p and localized unoccupied twofold t2 subband of Cu 3d states. Although the sintering of pure and Cu-doped ZnO particles was equivalent, the electrical properties diverged. The copper insertion enhanced the resistivity and the non-linearity coefficient reached values higher than the unity. This is maybe due to the presence of copper at the grain boundaries forming a Schottky barrier. Neither the non-ohmic electrical behavior nor the RTFM from nanostructured superstructures was ever reported before.