Tunable dielectric permittivity and microwave absorption properties of Pt-decorated SiC nanowires prepared by magnetic sputtering

Abstract

Due to the high temperature resistance, the SiC nanowires have been widely considered as a potential electromagnetic-wave absorbing material, but their absorption ability is still unsatisfactory. In this work, the Pt nanoparticles with the size of 3–5 nm are decorated on the SiC nanowires surface by the facile magnetron sputtering in a very short time and without the post-treatment processes. By controlling the sputtering time, the dielectric and microwave absorption properties of the SiC nanowires are effectively regulated and improved. At the sputtering time of 60 s, the Pt-decorated SiC nanowires achieve an effective absorption (reflection loss <−10 dB) bandwidth of 3.7 GHz (8.5–12.2 GHz), covering most of the X-band at a low filling ratio of 10 wt%. Such an improvement is attributed to the enhancement of the conductance loss and interface polarization loss induced by the Pt-decoration.