Exchange coupled pairs of dangling bond spins as a new type of paramagnetic defects in nanodiamonds

EPR in detonation nanodiamonds (DND) reveals two different signals associated with intrinsic carbon inherited paramagnetic defects. Main carbon inherited EPR signal is narrow intensive Lorentzian-like singlet with g=2.0028 and spin concentration N_s=(6-7)×10¹⁹ spin/g that yields on average 13-15 spins per each DND particle. Additional chemical treatment of DND powder allows practically complete removal of trace amounts of transition metal impurities that reveals a new doublet EPR signal consisting of two relatively narrow lines within the half-field region (g∼4) separated by a distance of 10.4 mT. The intensity of the doublet signal is five orders of magnitude lower than that of the main singlet signal. The former signal has been observed in a wide variety of DND samples disregarding of the impurity level reached and thus may be attributed to some intrinsic defects in DND particles. Such half-field EPR signals correspond to "forbidden" ΔM_s=2 transitions within thermally populated triplet (S=1) levels observed in polycrystalline samples containing exchange dimers-antiferromagnetically coupled spin pairs. Estimates suggest that the concentration of such defects is about one dimer per hundreds DND particles.