Low temperature synthesis and influence of Ce3+ substitution on structural and magnetic properties of nanocrystalline cobalt ferrite using citrate precursor sol-gel method

Rare earth element Ce3+ substituted spinel cobalt ferrite, CoFe2-xCexO4 for (x = 0.0, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20) is synthesized using an economical sol–gel technique. The X-ray diffraction analysis reveals that all samples have spinel symmetry indexed to Fd3m space group. Fullprof Rietveld analysis is performed to find out lattice parameters that increase monotonically due to induced lattice strains in samples. The crystallite size was determined to be 54.9 nm using Williamson-Hall plots. The morphological analysis of samples has been performed using SEM imaging. FTIR spectrum confirms octahedral and tetrahedral site occupancy by metal–oxygen bonds for all samples. The magnetic properties of samples refine with Ce3+ doping at iron site, with magnetization ranging from 23.59 to 57.68 emu/g and retentivity 17.14 to 24.08 emu/g. The Coercive field values drastically increased from 739 to 1912 Gauss. Thus, we have explored the influence of rare earth Ce3+ (1.14 A) substitution at the Fe3+ site (0.55 A) in CoFe2O4 crystal lattice for improvement of its structural and magnetic properties in this paper.