Routes of Synthesis and Characterization of Ce-Bi intermetallic nanowires

CAMILO B. R. JESÚS; KAROLINE O. MOURA; DINA TOBIA; PRISCILA F. S. ROSA; KLEBER R. PIROTA; PASCOAL G. PAGLIUSO

París

Simposio; 22nd International Symposium on Metastable, Amorphous and Nanostructured Materials; 2015

We report growth attempts for synthesizing intermetallic nanowires of Ce-Bi alloys using a recently developed metallic flux nanonucleatation (MFNN) method. This novel method allows the concomitant synthesis of single crystals of a particular intermetallic compound from flux growth and the nucleation of the same compound in nanowire form inside the pores of a Al2O3 template. Here, we have explored the trying routes for synthesizing intermetallic nanowires of CeBi2. From growth attempts, we have extracted single crystals of CeBi2 and intermetallic nanowires with 200 nm diameter and few microns length. The single crystals and the nanowires were investigated using X-ray diffraction, Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), Transmission electronic Microscopy (TEM), magnetic susceptibility and heat capacity experiments. The CeBi2 single crystals present an antiferromagnetic ordering at TN~3 K in agreement with a previous report. Interestingly, the metallic nanowires extracted from the same growth show absence of phase transitions, showing a paramagnetic behavior down to 2 K. We will discuss the possible Ce-Bi composition of the obtained nanowires and argue about the possible origins of the apparent suppression of the magnetic ordering in the nanowires.