Synthesis and investigation of structural, morphological, and magnetic properties of the manganese doped cobalt-zinc spinel ferrite

Abstract

The current work involves the synthesis of MnxCo0.5−xZn0.5Fe2O4 (x = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4) by adopting sol-gel auto combustion technique. For all the samples, the single-phase spinel structure with cubic symmetry was assured by the XRD studies. The crystallite size lies in the nanoscale range of 35.4–43.6 nm as estimated by utilizing Debye-Scherrer formula. FTIR spectroscopy affirms the formation of spinel structure due to the appearance of characteristic vibrational bands near 400 and 600 cm−1 which corresponds to the octahedral and tetrahedral sites respectively. FESEM micrographs reveal the presence of non-uniform grain growth which was agglomerated, inhomogenous in size and shape, and having porous morphology. VSM study exhibits soft ferromagnetic nature due to the low coercivity value. There is a decrement in the saturation magnetization with increasing Mn2+ concentration which is due to the decrease in the crystallite size and non-magnetic nature of the Mn2+.