Affiliations: [a] Department of Refractories, Ceramics and Building Materials, National Research Centre, Dokki, Giza, Egypt
| [b] Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, USA
| [c] Department of Solid State Physics, National Research Centre, Dokki, Giza, Egypt
| [d] Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: M.M.S. Wahsh, Department of Refractories, Ceramics and Building Materials, National Research Centre, 12622, Dokki, Giza, Egypt. E-mail: mmswahsh@yahoo.com.
Abstract: Cd2+ doped cobalt ferrite magnetic nanoparticles with the formula CdxCo1-xFe2O4 (x = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5) were successfully synthesized and coated by silica shell. The effects of non-magnetic Cd+2 doping and silica coating on structural, magnetic, and optical properties of CoFe2O4 nano-particles had been investigated. XRD patterns confirmed that all samples were found to have a cubic spinel structure with average crystallite sizes 15–43 nm. It was observed that increasing the amount of Cd2+ up to certain amount (x = 0.4) leads to an increase of saturation magnetization. The band gap energy tends to increase with silica coating and increasing in Cd2+ content to reach maximum value of 1.61 eV for Cd0.5Co0.5Fe2O4/SiO2 sample, which implies that this material is a good candidate for using in magnetic data storage and applications that rely on magneto-optical properties.
Keywords: Cobalt ferrite, cadmium doping, band gap energy, magneto-optical properties, silica coating
