Impact of annealing temperature on structural, optical, and Mössbauer properties of nanocrystalline NiFe2O4

• Published in: Journal of materials science. Materials in electronics 2021-12, Vol.32 (23), p.27232-27242
• Main Authors: Mund, H. S., Prajapat, Pradeep, Dhaka, Saroj, Kumar, Sudesh, Saxena, Abhishek, Meena, Sher Singh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Annealing; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Crystallites; Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy; Materials Science; Mossbauer spectroscopy; Nanocrystals; Nickel ferrites; Optical and Electronic Materials; Optical properties; Raman spectroscopy; Sol-gel processes; Spectrum analysis; Spinel; Ultraviolet reflection; X-ray diffraction
• ISSN: 0957-4522; 1573-482X
• DOI: 10.1007/s10854-021-07089-6

In this paper, we have investigated the effect of annealing temperature on the structural, optical, and Mössbauer properties of nanocrystalline (NC) nickel ferrites (NFOs) synthesized by the sol–gel auto-combustion method. The NFOs were characterized by X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, Diffusion reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), and Mössbauer spectroscopy techniques. The XRD results show that the average crystallite size increases from 27.5 to 54.3 nm when increasing the annealing temperature from 200 to 1000 °C. The Ultraviolet–Visible Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (UV-DRS) measurement is used to find the optical band gap observed between 1.92 and 1.75 eV for NFOs annealed at 200 and 1000 °C, respectively. The Mössbauer study confirmed that the structure transforms from mixed spinel to inverse spinel structure when moving to higher annealing temperature.