A study of defect structures in Fe-alloyed ZnO: Morphology, magnetism, and hyperfine interactions

In order to study the effect of Fe cation substitution on the local structure, defect formation, and hyperfine interactions in ZnO, Mössbauer spectroscopy measurements of the microwave processed Zn 1 - x Fe x O (x = 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, and 0.20) nanoparticles, together with ab initio calculations, were performed. Complementary information on the distribution of particle size and morphology, as well as magnetic properties, were obtained by X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, and squid-magnetometry. The selected model for analyzing the Mössbauer spectra of our samples is a distribution of quadrupole splittings. The fitting model with two Lorentz doublets was rejected due to its failure to include larger doublets. The Fe 3 + ions do not yield magnetic ordering in the samples at room temperature. The results from first-principles calculations confirm that the major component of the Mössbauer spectra corresponds to the Fe-alloyed ZnO with Zn vacancy in the next nearest neighbor environment. The magnetic measurements are consistent with the description of the distribution of iron ions over the randomly formed clusters in the ZnO host lattice. While at room temperature all the samples are paramagnetic, magnetic interactions cause a transition into a cluster spin-glass state at low temperatures. © 2019 Author(s)