• Das, Lakshmi
• Tapani, Tlek
• Maccaferri, Nicolò
• Salh, Roushdey
• Lin, Haifeng
• Gracia-Espino, Eduardo
• Boulanger, Nicolas
• Bhuvanendran, Hinduja
• Canto-Aguilar, Esdras J.

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Nickel (II) oxide, NiO, is a wide band gap Mott insulator characterized by strong Coulomb repulsion between d-band electrons and displays antiferromagnetic order at room temperature. NiO has gained attention in recent years as a very promising candidate for applications in a broad set of areas, from chemistry and metallurgy to spintronics and energy storage and production. Here, we report on the fabrication of polycrystalline NiO using spray-pyrolysis technique, which is a deposition technique able to produce films of pure and crystalline materials without the need of high vacuum or inert atmospheres.The composition and structure of the NiO films were then studied using X-ray diffraction, and atomic force and scanning electron microscopies. Thephononic and magnonic properties of theNiO thin films were also studied via Raman spectroscopy. We finally studies the ultrafast charge dynamics by using non-degenerate optical pump probe spectroscopy. We found that our NiO samples display the same phonon and magnon excitations expected for single crystal NiO at room temperature. As well, the charge dynamics in our system is very similar to those of previously reported NiO mono- and polycrystalline systems synthesized using different techniques. Our results prove that spray-pyrolysis can be used as affordable and large-scale fabrication technique to synthesize strongly correlated materials for a large set of applications.</jats:p>

Topics

• Deposition
• pyrolysis
• impedance spectroscopy
• single crystal
• nickel
• x-ray diffraction
• thin film
• Raman spectroscopy