Suppression of magnetoelectric effects in DyCrO4 by chemical doping

Abstract

The scheelite-type DyCrO4 shows a large linear magnetoelectric effect and field-induced ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity. In this article, we investigate the Bi-doping effects on the crystal structure, magnetism, dielectric constant, and electric polarization for a Dy1−xBixCrO4 (x = 0, 0.05, 0.1) solid solution. The substitution of Bi for Dy up to 10% does not change the structure and antiferromagnetic ordering temperature very much. However, it remarkably suppresses the magnetodielectric effect from 14% in the parent phase to 3.2% in the x = 0.1 sample. More sharply, the maximum field-induced electric polarization is reduced from 320 μC/m2 (x = 0) to 10 μC/m2 (x = 0.1). The results reveal that Dy plays a crucial role in the origin of the large linear magnetoelectric effect of DyCrO4, so chemical doping on this site provides an effective method to manipulate the magnetodielectric and magnetoelectric properties.