Structural, Morphological, Optical and Magnetic Investigations of Mn-Doped BaTiO3 Nanostructures for Spintronic Applications

Recent research has focused a great deal of emphasis on multifunctional soft ferromagnetic (FM) materials based on perovskite-type structures, as these materials are in great demand for spintronic applications. In this work, wet sol–gel synthesis was used to produce BaTi 1− x Mn x O 3 nanoparticles doped with two different concentrations of Mn at a cheap cost. The x-ray diffraction (XRD) data indicate that Mn doping marginally increases the lattice parameters of BaTiO 3 , but nevertheless maintains the tetragonal phase of the material. The study of the doped nanoparticles using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) shows that they are aggregated with a polycrystalline structure. For 0.25% and 0.5% Mn-doped BaTiO 3 , the computed grain size distribution had average diameters of 47.20 ± 1.05 and 60.97 ± 0.87 nm, respectively. An investigation using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) revealed that the nanoparticles’ faulty oxygen concentration increased due to Mn doping. UV–vis measurements indicate that the band gap slightly decreases from 2.28 eV to 2.25 eV, whereas the photoluminescence emission intensity is found to be decreasing with Mn content in BaTiO 3 . Magnetic measurements reveal that the 0.5%Mn-doped BaTiO 3 material specifically exhibits soft FM features with its small coercivity ( H C = 97 Oe) and low saturation magnetization ( M S = 0.025 emu/g), that suggest its viability for developing spintronic applications, particularly for minimizing device energy consumption.