Studies on Modified PZT – CoFe2O4 Magnetoelectric Composites

Abstract

Advancement in science and technology demands tailor-made materials to satisfy various requirements of the applications in industries. Metallic oxides are an important class of compounds, among which, ferroelectrics and ferrites are most prominent. The main driving force for wide attention in ferroelectric and ferrite materials is their large number of electric and magnetic applications. With the trend towards the device miniaturization, there is ever increasing interest in combining electric and magnetic properties in single materials to perform more than one task and these materials are called magnetoelectric materials. In the last few decades, extensive research work has been carried out on magnetoelectric materials. These materials have attracted much attention from the researchers because they have the properties of their parent compounds (ferrite and ferroelectric phase) and unique property-the magnetoelectric effect. Magnetoelectric effect is a coupled two field effect in which application of either a magnetic field or an electric field induces an electric polarization and magnetization respectively. These magnetoelectric materials can be categorized into two classes- Single phase magnetoelectric and two phase magnetoelectric materials (composites). The single phase magnetoelectric materials have temperature constraints and they show ME effect at low temperature only. The value of ME coefficient shown by these materials are very low so these materials are not suitable for any technological applications. This difficulty has been overcome by two phase magnetoelectric materials (ferrite-ferroelectric composites). These composites show magnetoelectric coupling depending upon their compositions and properties of constituent phases. Due to presence of ME coupling, these composite materials have various advantages over single phase magnetoelectric materials and they find a lot of technological applications in radio electronics, optoelectronics, microwave electronics and transducers in instrumentation, waveguides, phase inverters, rectifier, modulators, integral optics and fiber communication technology.