Abstract
This article aims to investigate the possibility to turn the multiferroic orders and magnetocapacitance effect close to/above room temperature in nanosized GaFeO3 ceramics by a sol-gel preparation method and substitution with non-magnetic Zn atoms. Therefore, in this work, we have synthesized a series of nanocrystalline Ga1-xZnxFeO3(GZFO, x = 0, 0.01, 0.05 and 0.1) ceramic samples and study the effect of Zn substitution on their structural, magnetic, and electric properties. All the GZFO samples have an orthorhombic structure with Pc21n space group and the value of lattice parameters increase systematically with increasing Zn concentration. Interestingly, it shows that magnetic and electric properties are strongly dependent on the Zn substitution concentration. Based on the results of temperature-dependent magnetizations, M(T), it is observed that with increasing Zn-content up to 0.10, the ferrimagnetic transition temperature (TC) increases from 306 to 320 K. It is also found that the nanocrystalline Zn-doped GaFeO3 (GFO) samples exhibit the characteristics of ferroelectricity at room temperature. Furthermore, the magnetization, ferroelectric polarization and magnetocapacitance of Zn-doped GFO nanosized ceramics are enhanced compared to those of the pristine sample of GFO ferrite. These results open wide perspectives for the applications of room temperature multiferroic devices.
Highlights
GFO crystallizes in non-centrosymmetric orthorhombic structure with a space group Pc21n and with four different cation sites, that is, labeled Fe1 and Fe2, which are predominantly occupied by Fe3+ and other two labeled as Ga1 and Ga2, which are mostly occupied by Ga3+ [4] [5]
We synthesized a series of nanocrystalline Ga1−xZnxFeO3 (GZFO, x = 0, 0.01, 0.05 and 0.1) ceramic samples by a sol-gel method to systematically study the effect of Zn substitution on their magnetic and multiferroic properties
Based on the standard reference (JCPDS Files No.26-0673), all the observed peaks of the GZFO samples can be indexed on the basis of an orthorhombic unit cell of space group, Pc21n, suggesting that all samples without any secondary phase
Summary
Among these materials, gallium ferrite, GaFeO3 (GFO), has been reported to exhibit ferrimagnetic (FM) and piezoelectric orderings and has been intensively studied for its practical application as a ME ferrimagnet [3] [4]. The effect of the substitution of a non-magnetic cation on the net magnetization of a ferrimagnet is difficult to predict. We aim to study the impact of substituting GFO with non-magnetic Zn2+ for Ga3+-ion on the multiferroism.
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