Production of bulk dilute ferromagnetic semiconductor by mechanical milling

We tried to prepare the bulk dilute ferromagnetic semiconductor (DMS) by mechanical milling (MM). Experimental results were as following: (1) The observation of X-ray diffraction and transmitting electron microscopy showed that the particle diameter of host ZnO powder were reduced to about 10 nm by MM. (2) The MM for the mixtures of V2O5/ZnO or γ-Fe2O3/ZnO realizes the V- or Fe-doped ZnO nano-powders. (3) The values of magnetization under the field of 5 kOe were nearly saturated to 0.8×10−3 to 3×10−3 μB/V-ion for VxZn1−xO (x=0.05, 0.1 and 0.2), and 0.2–0.3 μB/Fe-ion for FexZn1−xO (x=0.05 and 0.1) at room temperature. The above results show that the ferromagnetic DMS powder of VxZn1−xO and FexZn1−xO were successfully prepared by MM method.