Magnetic Silicon Fullerene

TL;DR

This paper predicts a stable europium-encapsulating silicon fullerene with high magnetic moment and explores its potential for spintronics and magnetic storage applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Eu@Si20 silicon fullerene structure with high stability and magnetic properties, and demonstrates the feasibility of a nanowire with retained high spin moment.

Findings

Eu@Si20 is the most stable silicon fullerene predicted by DFT.

Eu@Si20 has a magnetic moment of nearly 7.0 Bohr magnetons.

A stable nanowire constructed from Eu@Si20 units retains high spin moments.

Abstract

A metal-encapsulating silicon fullerene, Eu@Si20, has been predicted by density functional theory to be by far the most stable fullerene-like silicon structure. The Eu@Si20 structure is a dodecahedron with D2h symmetry in which the europium atom occupies the center site. The calculated results show that the europium atom has a large magnetic moment of nearly 7.0 Bohr magnetons. In addition, it was found that a stable "pearl necklace" nanowire, constructed by concatenating a series of Eu@Si20 units, with the central europium atom, retains the high spin moment. The magnetic structure of the nanowire indicates potential applications in the fields of spintronics and high-density magnetic storage.