Impedance and AC conductivity study of nano crystalline, fine grained multiferroic bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3), synthesized by microwave sintering

In this paper, major reduction in sintering time,temperautre and significant improvement over final density of sitnered sample is reported for the microwave sintered nanocrystalline BiFeO3 (BFO) ceramic. Also, different sintering time and temperatures have been used to tailor the grain size and the final density of the resulting BFO ceramics synthesized from phase pure BFO nanoparticles (d̄ ≈10 nm). Microwave sintering resulted in reducing the sintering time substantially (by 1h), and has resulted in submicron sized grains and high resistivity ∼1.8 GΩ-cm. The AC conductivity is seen to follow the Jonscher’s power law behavior, suggesting correlated barrier hopping (CBH) mechanism in the sample. The role of oxygen vacancies at high temperature, due to volatility of bismuth, in dielectric and conductivity behavior is also discussed. Further, the sample displayed dielectric anomaly near magnetic transition temperature (∼180 °C) indicating bearing of magnetic moments on the dielectric properties. Using Impedance Spectroscopy (IS) we have established, the electrical heterogeneity of the ceramic BFO reavealing semiconducting nature of grains and insulating nature of grain boundary. This, formation of network of insulating grain boundaries and semiconducting grains could lead to formation of internal barrier layer capacitance (IBLC) leading to high dielectric constant in microwave sintered BFO.