Giant enhancement and anomalous temperature dependence of magnetism in monodispersed NiPt2 nanoparticles

• DOI: 10.1007/s12274-017-1643-y
• Publication Date: 2017-06-27T02:37:31Z
• Authors: Aixian Shan; Chinping Chen; Wei Zhang; Daojian Cheng; Xi Shen; Richeng Yu; Rongming Wang
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy

A simple yet general one-step solvothermal method is applied to synthesize sub-7 nm monodispersed single-crystal NiPt2 nanoparticles (NPs) with the morphology of truncated octahedrons in the alloying state of disordered atomic arrangements. The effective magnetic moments of these NPs exhibit an anomalous temperature dependency, increasing from approximately 0.9 μB/atom at 15 K to 1.9 μB/atom at 300 K. This is an increase by a factor of more than three compared with bulk Ni. On the basis of experiments involving X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy of the L3 edge for Pt and density functional theory calculations, the observed novel magnetism enhancement and its anomalous temperature dependence are attributed to the electron transfer arising from the thermal-activation effects.