Effect of oxygen vacancy on half metallicity in Ni-doped CeO{sub 2} diluted magnetic semiconductor
The electronic and magnetic properties of Ni-doped CeO{sub 2} diluted amgentic semiconductor (DMS) including the effect of oxygen vacancy (V{sub o}) with doping concentration, x = 0.125 have been calculated using FPLAPW method based on Density Functional Theory (DFT) as implemented in WIEN2k. In the present supercell approach, the XC potential was constructed using GGA+U formalism in which Coulomb correction is applied to standard GGA functional within the parameterization of Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE). We have found that the ground state properties of bulk CeO{sub 2} compound have been modified significantly due to the substitution of Ni-dopant at the cation (Ce) site with/without V{sub O} and realized that the ferromagnetism in CeO{sub 2} remarkably depends on the V{sub o} concentrations. The presence of V{sub o}, in Ni-doped CeO{sub 2}, can leads to strong ferromagnetic coupling between the nearest neighboring Ni-ions and induces a HMF in this compound. Such ferromagnetic exchange coupling is mainly attributed to spin splitting of Ni-d states, via electrons trapped in V{sub o}. The HMF characteristics of Ni-doped CeO{sub 2} including V{sub o} makes it an ideal material for spintronic devices.