Arup Samanta

The potential applications of dilute magnetic oxides (DMOs) in magneto-optic and spintronic devices have attracted significant attention, although understanding their magnetic behavior is complex due to intricate interactions of intrinsic defects. The present study aims to investigate the effect of different annealing environments on the magnetic properties of polycrystalline transition metal cation (Co and Y) doped CeO2 DMO with a 5% doping concentration of transition metal (TM). The objective is to investigate the defect interactions within the lattice through a comprehensive investigation involving structural characterizations, magnetic measurements, and first principle calculations. The results show that the Ar/H2 annealing environment induced more oxygen vacancies than air-annealed samples. Consequently, field-dependent magnetization measurements revealed above-room-temperature ferromagnetism (RTFM) in both un-doped and TM-doped CeO2. The ferromagnetic (FM) properties of CeO2 resulted from carrier-trapped vacancy centers facilitating exchange interactions between the spins of magnetic ions. The Langevin field profile indicated that TM-doped CeO2 formed more bound magnetic polarons (BMPs) during annealing in an Ar/H2 environment, which contributed to the enhanced ferromagnetism. Similarly, enhancement in the magnetic properties with increasing oxygen vacancies is observed through first principle calculations. This suggests the potential for optimizing the magnetic properties of DMOs through controlled annealing processes.

Vertically aligned silicon micro/nanowire arrays of different sizes have been synthesized by combining the modified metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) and reactive ion etching (RIE) methods. This is a novel lithography-free method to fabricate silicon micro/nanowire arrays. The size of micro/nanowire arrays is controlled by controlling the etching rate and diameter of silica particles. The silicon micro/nanowire geometry can utilize for efficient collection of photo-generated charge carriers from impure silicon wafers, which have a short minority carrier diffusion length also act as a self-antireflection coating layer. For micro/nanowire having average diameters of 40 nm, 330 nm and 950 nm and their corresponding average length 1.12 micron, 1.1 micron, and 1 micron, respectively, the observed average reflectance was 0.22, 0.6 and 0.33 percent at 45-degree incident angle, while the average reflectance was increased up to 4.2, 9.2, and 11 percent, respectively at 75-degree incident angle in the broad range of 300 - 1200 nm of the solar spectrum. The measured average reflectance for these samples is quite low compared to the planar silicon wafer. Thus this geometry is a promising candidate for fabricating low-cost and highly efficient radial junction silicon micro/nanowire arrays based solar cells.