Abstract
The discovery of room-temperature ferromagnetism of hydrogenated epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide challenges for a fundamental understanding of this long-range phenomenon. Carbon allotropes with their dispersive electron states at the Fermi level and a small spin-orbit coupling are not an obvious candidate for ferromagnetism. Here we show that the origin of ferromagnetism in hydrogenated epitaxial graphene with a relatively high Curie temperature (>300 K) lies in the formation of curved specific carbon site regions in the graphene layer, induced by the underlying Si-dangling bonds and by the hydrogen bonding. Hydrogen adsorption is therefore more favourable at only one sublattice site, resulting in a localized state at the Fermi energy that can be attributed to a pseudo-Landau level splitting. This n = 0 level forms a spin-polarized narrow band at the Fermi energy leading to a high Curie temperature and larger magnetic moment can be achieved due to the presence of Si dangling bonds underneath the hydrogenated graphene layer.
Highlights
IntroductionChemical functionalization of graphene attracted a good deal of attention among scientists for various reasons [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
Room-temperature ferromagnetism is explored theoretically for hydrogenated graphene, but experimentally it was only obtained for epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide (SiC) [25]
This layer does not present the electronic properties of graphene since it is interacting with the substrate by means of the covalent bonds between the C atoms of this layer and the Si atoms of the substrate surface
Summary
Chemical functionalization of graphene attracted a good deal of attention among scientists for various reasons [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. [4] the authors calculated the coupling of defect-induced extended states, assuming two different types of defects, the hydrogen chemisorption defect and the vacancy defect by first principles electronic structure calculations, showing either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic ordering depending on whether the defects are distributed on the same or different sublattices of the graphene lattice. In this last approach, room-temperature ferromagnetism is explored theoretically for hydrogenated graphene, but experimentally it was only obtained for epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide (SiC) [25]. This was the motivation to study the interplay between the structural properties and the electronic structure of hydrogenated epitaxial graphene
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