Effect of two different dopants on structural and optical properties of bismuth vanadate

Abstract

Bi4-xPbxV2O11-δ and Bi4V2-xAlxO11-δ (0.1≤x≤0.4) are synthesized by the solid state reaction me-thod to study the effect of two different substituents on the structure and optical properties. The Rietveld refinement results confirmed that Bi4-xPbxV2O11-δ (0.1≤x≤0.4) and Bi4V2-xAlxO11-δ up to x=0.1 exhibits monoclinic structure. For higher Al3+ substitutions which lead to form orthorhom-bic structure. The optical band gap and Urbach energy values are calculated from UV-visible spectra. Al3+ doped system shows low optical band gap values as compared to Pb2+ doped sys-tem. In both the cases, the optical band gaps lie in semiconducting range.