Cr cation-anchored carbon nanosheets: synthesis, paramagnetism and ferromagnetism

Abstract

Since the successfully synthesis of monolayer graphene, carbon-based materials have attracted wide and extensive attentions from researches. Due to the excellent transport capacity and conductivity, they are promising to be applied in electronic devices, even substituting the silicon-based electronic devices, optoelectronics and spintronics. Nevertheless, due to the non magnetic feature, many efforts have been devoted to endow carbon materials magnetism to apply them in the spintronic devices fabrication. Herein, a strategy of Cr cation solely anchored on two-dimensional carbon nanosheets by Cr–N bonds is developed, which introduces magnetism in carbon nanosheets. By extended x-ray absorption fine structure characterization, Cr cations are demonstrated to be atomically dispersed with Cr–N3 coordination. And after Cr–N3 anchored, carbon nanosheets exhibit ferromagnetic features with paramagnetic background. The magnetization varies with Cr content and reaches the maximum (Cr: 2.0%, 0.86 emu g−1) under 3 T at 50 K. The x-ray magnetic circular dichroism and first-principle calculations indicate that the magnetism is caused by the Cr3+ component of the anchored Cr cations. This study sets a single cation anchoring carbon as a suitable candidate for future spintronics.