Effect of Sm3+ doping on ferroelectric, energy storage and photoluminescence properties of BaTiO3 ceramics

Abstract

Rare earth doped ferroelectric ceramics have attracted much attention due to their great potential application for novel multifunctional optical-electro devices. Herein, the x% mol Sm3+ doped BaTiO3 (BTO:xSm3+) ceramics were fabricated by the conventional solid-state reaction method. The Sm3+ ions composition dependent phase structure, ferroelectric, energy storage and photoluminescence properties were systematically investigated. With the increase of Sm3+ ions composition, the remanent polarization decreases dramatically from 15.705 μC/cm2 (BTO) to 7.132 μC/cm2 (BTO:3.0%Sm3+), but the energy storage density and efficiency increase greatly with a relative change of 79.76% and 31.13%, respectively. Furthermore, Sm3+ doping causes the transformation from the tetragonal to pseudo-cubic phase for BTO ceramics at room temperature, resulting in a broader temperature transition range from the ferroelectric to paraelectric phase and a lower Curie temperature. Particularly, the pure BTO and BTO:xSm3+ ceramics show great thermal stability for energy storage properties. In addition, under the excitation of 408 nm near-ultraviolet light, the BTO:xSm3+ ceramics exhibit the strongest orange-red emission peak around 596 nm with a large relative tunability of intensity by 88.97%. The results suggest that the BTO:xSm3+ ceramics are suitable for the design of optoelectronic devices.