Effect of fuel type on the solution combustion synthesis, structure, and magnetic properties of YIG nanocrystals

The conditions of solution combustion synthesis (SCS), especially the type of fuel, affect the functional properties of the particles synthesized by this method and, as a result, their applications fields. In the course of this work, the influence of fuel on the structural, morphological, and magnetic properties of yttrium iron garnet (YIG) particles was studied. The resulted products of SCS were investigated by various methods of physicochemical analysis, including powder X-ray diffractometry, Raman spectroscopy, Mossbauer spectroscopy, and vibrational magnetometry. According to the results of X-ray phase analysis, the main phase in all samples is cubic YIG, the size of which varies in the range of 121-181 nm depending on the fuel used (glycine < citric acid < urea). YIG particles have close to isometric morphology and strong aggregation, which was confirmed by SEM. In contrast to the practically pure sample synthesized using glycine, in the Raman spectra of the samples obtained using citric acid and urea, vibrational modes of the hematite impurity were observed. The results of Mossbauer spectroscopy confirmed the purity of the sample synthesized using glycine compared to the two other samples. The saturation magnetization of YIG crystals obtained using glycine reaches 65.4 emu/g which is significantly higher than the two other samples (28.4-38.7 emu/g), which may indicate the complete crystallization and atomic ordering of magnetic moments.