Structural, optical, and magnetic properties of Fe doped In2O3 powders

• Synthesis of Fe doped In2O3 powders using a solid state reaction.
• Characterization of the samples using XRD, UV–vis-NIR, FT-IR, and VSM.
• All Fe doped In2O3 powders exhibited the cubic structure of In2O3.
• All the Fe doped In2O3 samples exhibited room temperature ferromagnetism.

Iron doped indium oxide dilute magnetic semiconductor (In1−xFex)2O3 (x = 0.00, 0.03, 0.05, and 0.07) powders were synthesized by standard solid state reaction method followed by vacuum annealing. The effect of Fe concentration on structural, optical, and magnetic properties of the (In1−xFex)2O3 powders have been systematically studied. X-ray diffraction patterns confirmed the polycrystalline cubic structure of all the samples. An optical band gap increases from 3.12 eV to 3.16 eV while Fe concentration varying from 0.03 to 0.07. Magnetic studies reveal that virgin/undoped In2O3 is diamagnetic. However, all the Fe-doped In2O3 samples are ferromagnetic. The saturation magnetization (Ms) of ferromagnetic (In1−xFex)2O3 (x = 0.03, 0.05, and 0.07) samples increases from 11.56 memu/g to 148.64 memu/g with x = 0.03–0.07. The observed ferromagnetism in these samples was attributed to magnetic nature of the dopant (Fe) as well as defects created in the samples during vacuum annealing.

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