Low temperature EPR investigation of Co2+ ion doped into rutile TiO2 single crystal: Experiments and simulations

Abstract In this paper, we present the results of X-band EPR spectra of Co 2+ ion doped rutile (TiO 2 ) which is one of the most promising memristor material. We obtained the angular variation of spectra in three mutually perpendicular planes at liquid helium (7–13 K) temperatures. Since the impurity ions have ½ effective spin and 7/2 nuclear spin, a relatively simple spin Hamiltonian containing only electronic Zeeman and hyperfine terms was utilized. Two different methods were used in theoretical analysis. Firstly, a linear regression analysis of spectra based on perturbation theory was studied. However, this approach is not sufficient for analyzing Co +2 spectra and leads to complex eigenvectors for G and A tensors due to large anisotropy of eigenvalues. Therefore, all spectra were analyzed again with exact diagonalization of spin Hamiltonian and the high accuracy eigenvalues and eigenvectors of G and A tensors were obtained by taking into account the effect of small sample misalignment from the exact crystallographic planes due to experimental conditions. Our results show that eigen-axes of g and A tensors are parallel to crystallographic directions. Hence, our EPR experiments proves that Co 2+ ions substitute for Ti 4+ ions in lattice. The obtained principal values of g tensor are g x =2.110(6), g y =5.890(2), g z =3.725(7) and principal values of hyperfine tensor are A x =42.4, A y =152.7, A z =26 (in 10 −4 /cm).