  We recently reported the observation of room temperature ferromagnetism in
mixtures of ZnO and Co3O4 despite the diamagnetic and antiferromagnetic
character of these oxides respectively. Here we present a detailed study on the
electronic structure of this material in order to account for this unexpected
ferromagnetism. Electrostatic interactions between both oxides lead to a
dispersion of Co3O4 particles over the surface of ZnO larger ones. As a
consequence, the reduction of Co+3 to Co2+ at the particle surface takes place
as evidenced by XAS measurements and optical spectrocopy. This reduction allows
to xplain the observed ferromagnetic signal within the well established
theories of magnetism.
