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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Defect-induced ferromagnetism in SiC

Wang, Yutian 30 January 2015 (has links)
Defect-induced ferromagnetism is attracting intensive research interest. It not only challenges the traditional opinions about ferromagnetism, but also has some potential applications in spin-electronics. SiC is a new candidate for the investigation of defect-induced ferromagnetism after graphitic materials and oxides due to its high material purity and crystalline quality. In this thesis, we made a comprehensive investigation on the structural and magnetic properties of ion implanted and neutron irradiated SiC sample. In combination with X-ray absorption spectroscopy and first-principles calculations, we try to understand the mechanism in a microscopic picture. For neon or xenon ion implanted SiC, we identify a multi-magnetic-phase nature. The magnetization of SiC can be decomposed into paramagnetic, superparamagnetic and ferromagnetic contributions. The ferromagnetic contribution persists well above room temperature and exhibits a pronounced magnetic anisotropy. We qualitatively explain the magnetic properties as a result of the intrinsic clustering tendency of defects. By combining X-ray magnetic circular dichroism and first-principles calculations, we clarify that p electrons of the nearest-neighbor carbon atoms around divacancies are mainly responsible for the long-range ferromagnetic coupling. Thus, we provide a direct correlation between the collective magnetic phenomena and the specific electrons/orbitals. With the aim to verify if the defect-induced magnetization can be increased by orders of magnitude, i.e., if a sample containing defects through its bulk volume can persist ferromagnetic coupling, we applied neutron irradiation to introduce defects into SiC. Besides a weak ferromagnetic contribution, we observe a strong paramagnetism, scaling up with the neutron fluence. The ferromagnetic contribution induced by neutron irradiation only occurs in a narrow fluence window or after annealing. It seems non-realistic to make the bulk specimens ferromagnetic by introducing defects. Instead, we speculate that defect-induced ferromagnetism rather locally appears in particular regions, like surface/interface/grain boundaries. A comparable investigation on neutron irradiated graphite supports the same conclusion.

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