Structural, optical, and magnetic properties study of Dy-Cr co-doped bismuth ferrite (BFO) nanoparticles

Dysprosium-Chromium co-doped bismuth ferrite (Bi_0.9Dy_0.1Fe_1-xCr_xO_3, x = 0, 0.05, and 0.1) nanoparticles were prepared by the sol–gel technique. The formed gel, held in an evaporating dish, was burned in a hot oven at 210 °C to form fluffy ash. The ground-burnt ash was sintered in a temperature-programmed electric furnace for 5 h at 820°C. The XRD results confirmed that all the prepared samples were in a rhombohedra structure with space group R3c. The XRD analysis revealed that the crystallite size decreased from 19.75 nm to 17.97 nm as the co-dopants increased. The energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) spectroscopy confirmed the presence of the ions as per the stoichiometry ratio. The VSM magnetic measurements revealed that the magnetic parameters, saturation magnetization (Ms), and remnant magnetization (Mr) relatively increased from 1.34 emu/g to 1.63 emu/g, and 0.262 to 0.412, respectively, with increasing the co-dopants, but the coercive field decreased. The UV–Vis measurement showed that the energy band gap (Eg) increased from 1.93 eV to 2.15 eV as the concentration of the co-dopants increased from x = 0 to x = 0.10.