Tuned optical and magnetic properties of Ce3+ doped SnS2 quantum dots

Magnetic semiconductor materials have been highly desired for spintronic applications in the past few years. Doping is an effective method to manipulate the magnetic and optical characteristics of non-magnetic semiconducting materials. Tin disulfide (SnS2), as a wide bandgap layered semiconductor, is a promising material in many fields, especially in spintronic devices. In this work, we propose a facile chemical reaction method to synthesize SnS2:Ce3+ quantum dots (QDs), and the optical and magnetic characteristics of the as-obtained samples are fully investigated. The results show that the substitutional Ce3+ dopants introduce robust intrinsic room-temperature ferromagnetism in the SnS2 semiconductor and the doping concentration of Ce3+ ions effectively influences the optical bandgap and photoluminescence properties of the samples. Furthermore, the theoretical calculations using VASP software indicate that ferromagnetism mainly comes from the exchange interaction between 4f and 5d orbitals of the Ce dopant. These findings demonstrate that the doping dependent optical and magnetic characteristics of the SnS2:Ce3+ QD material can enable its application in electronics and spintronics.