Band gap engineering of ZnMnO diluted magnetic semiconductor by alloying with ZnS

Highlights: • The effect of the sulfur dopant concentration on the structural, optical and magnetic properties. • Band gap energy of the films decreases from 3.2 eV to 2.96 eV with increasing the sulfur dopant concentration. • The SQUID and Hall Effect measurements demonstrate the room temperature ferromagnetism in the sulfur doped ZnMnO thin films. In this paper we report the results on the fabrication of diluted magnetic semiconductors Zn_1−xMn_xO_1−yS_y thin films with manganese x = 0.05 and sulfur 0 ≤ y ≤ 0.15 compositions, respectively, by using ultrasonic spray pyrolysis method. The influence of the sulfur concentration on the band gap energy, structural and magnetic properties have been studied by using optical transmission, X-ray diffraction and superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) measurements, respectively. The morphology and composition of samples were studied by using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). With increasing of the sulfur concentration the band gap energy of composition decreases, while the magnetization increases proportional to the sulfur concentration.