Structural, magnetic, and electrical evaluations of rare earth Gd3+doped in mixed Co-Mn spinel ferrite nanoparticles

The controlled and stable crystal structure, reduction in Curie temperature and semiconducting nature of oxide materials are the key factors for magnetoelectrical applications. Therefore, Co0.6Mn0.4GdxFe2-xO4 where x = 0, 0.033, 0.066 and 0.10 were synthesized to analyse the structural, morphological, magnetic, and electrical properties using a sol-gel autocombustion approach. The X-ray diffraction pattern reveals that the cubic crystallite size decreases with increasing smaller content of Gd3+ oxides without any secondary phase. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) study explain the complete morphology, agglomeration and dense structure of rare earth-doped Gd oxide in the mixed Co-Mn spinel ferrite nanoparticles. Fourier transform infrared spectra confirms the formation of a spinel structure with absorption bands below 1000 cm-1. The magnetic analysis shows that the saturation magnetization (59.20 emu/g - 49.71 emu/g) and coercivity (985.21 Oe - 254.11 Oe) of the synthesized samples decreased with increasing content of Gd3+ ions. The increase in DC conductivity with increasing temperature verifies the semiconducting nature of the synthesized samples, and a higher DC conductivity of the Co0.6Mn0.4Gd0.10Fe1.90O4(CMGF3) samples was observed at approximately 0.0362 S/cm at 973 K temperature.

Automated summary

In this study, rare earth-doped Gd oxide in mixed Co-Mn spinel ferrite nanoparticles was synthesized using a sol-gel autocombustion approach. The magnetic and electrical properties decreased with increasing Gd3+ ion content, but the samples exhibited semiconducting behavior.