Impact of gadolinium and manganese co-doping on the structural, dielectric and electrical characteristics of BST

Crystal structure, surface morphology, dielectric and electrical characterisation of manganese and gadolinium co-modified barium strontium titanate (BST) composite is reported. In the present work, Mn and Gd co-modified BST, i.e. Ba 0.76 (Gd 0.5 Mn 0.5 )0.04 Sr 0.2 TiO 3 composite is synthesised by sol-gel reaction technique. The crystallographic phase formation of calcined powder is confirmed by the X-ray diffraction technique. Unit cell parameters are extracted from Rietveld refinement of the XRD data using X’Pert High-score plus software. Average crystallite size and lattice strain are estimated from full-width half maxima of diffraction peaks following Scherrer’s equation and Haldar–Wagner’s method. The dielectric and electrical investigations are carried out by measuring the dielectric constant on the sintered pellets as a function of temperature from room temperature to 300 °C at the AC field frequencies of 100 Hz – 1 MHz.