Giant enhancement and anomalous temperature dependence of magnetism in monodispersed NiPt₂ nanoparticles

A simple yet general one-step solvothermal method is applied to synthesize sub-7 nm monodispersed single-crystal NiPt₂ nanoparticles (NPs) with the morphology of truncated octahedrons in the alloying state of disordered atomic arrangements. The effective magnetic moments of these NPs exhibit an anomalous temperature dependency, increasing from approximately 0.9 μ_B/atom at 15 K to 1.9 μ_B/atom at 300 K. This is an increase by a factor of more than three compared with bulk Ni. On the basis of experiments involving X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy of the L3 edge for Pt and density functional theory calculations, the observed novel magnetism enhancement and its anomalous temperature dependence are attributed to the electron transfer arising from the thermal-activation effects.