Metal oxides attract great interest of enormous research groups because of the broad range of their important technological properties. Particularly, tin dioxide (SnO2) presents itself as one of the promising materials where it possesses various properties suitable for fabrication of different efficient electronics and optoelectronics devices such as transparent conducting electrodes [Mishra R.K. 2012, and Saleh S.A. 2008], solar cells [ lEtre A.Y. 2010], photocatalysis [Esen B. 2011, and Cheng G. 2011] and so on.
Study of the bulk Fe doped SnO2 materials have been reported by many research groups while their properties in nanosized scale are not fully explored. This work presents a study of the effect of Fe doping on the structural, electrical and magnetic properties of tin dioxide particles synthesized in nano-sized scale. Fabrication of gas-sensor devices with tiny particles size improves significantly the sensibility of gas detection since the surface to volume ratio becomes much larger.
Sn1-xFexO2 (x =0.00, 0.02, 0.04, 0.06 and 0.08) nanoparticles have been synthesized using ball-milling method. The XRD patterns are corresponding to typical tetragonal structure of SnO2 alloys phases confirming the expected crystal structure. The microstructure study confirmed decrease of grain size with Fe doping which coincides with the XRD data.
The pure SnO2 sample was characterized by typical semiconductor behavior over the whole temperature of measurement (300-473K). However, the Fe-doped samples were featured by a transition between two distinct conduction mechanisms around a certain transition temperature. The low temperature region showed competition between carrier mobility and semiconductor conduction mechanisms while with elevating the measurement temperature, the semiconductor mechanism dominated.
The magnetic measurements revealed that the Sn1-xFexO2 (x= 0.00, 0.02 and 0.04) are diamagnetic materials. However, the x=0.06 and 0.08 samples are ferromagnetic with coercivity 5983 and 6620 Oe, respectively.