Highly Efficient Microwave Absorption of Magnetic Nanospindle Conductive Polymer Hybrids by Molecular Layer Deposition

Oxidative molecular layer deposition (oMLD) was applied to fabricate conductive polymer magnetic material core shell microwave absorbers in this work. One dimensional Fe3O4 poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) nanospindles with controllable PEDOT thickness were successfully synthesized. Their absorption performance was evaluated in the 2-18 GHz frequency range. With the advantage of oMLD, PEDOT shell thicknesses can be controlled precisely. Because the permittivity of Fe3O4 PEDOT nanospindles obviously increases while their permeability decreases slightly with the PEDOT cycles, the properties can be tuned effectively by only adjusting the PEDOT cycle number. With a proper PEDOT shell thickness, excellent reflection characteristics can be obtained. Remarkably high absorption strength (-55.0 dB at 16.2 GHz) and good absorption bandwidth (4.34 GHz less than 10 dB) were realized. Such excellent performance is better than that reported previously for most magnetic material-based absorbers. Considering the precise controllability and excellent absorption performance of the prepared microwave absorbers, we believe that oMLD is a facile synthetic route for microwave absorbers.