Room-temperature ferromagnetism of vanadium-doped 6H–SiC

Semiconductors doped with magnetic ions, also known as dilute magnetic semiconductors, reveal both semiconducting and ferromagnetic. In this Letter, we prepared vanadium-doped 6H–SiC single crystals for exhibiting ferromagnetism characteristic measured by superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer. Our work demonstrates that moderate doping of vanadium carbide powder into 6H–SiC is a novel attempt for finding ferromagnetism feature. And the testing results show that the observed magnetic signal is possibly contributing to V element. This phenomenon can be explained by sp-d exchange mechanism, and offers an experimental data for possibility of doping nonmagnetic atoms to control the local moments in wide band-gap semiconductors.