Magnetic and dielectric properties of Aurivillius phase Bi6Fe2Ti3O18 and the doped compounds

The magnetic and dielectric properties of Bi6Fe2Ti3O18, Bi6FeCoTi3O18, and Bi5LaFeCoTi3O18 are investigated. The room-temperature ferromagnetism is observed in the samples Bi6FeCoTi3O18 and Bi5LaFeCoTi3O18 compared with the paramagnetic behavior in Bi6Fe2Ti3O18 at room temperature. The ferromagnetism in Bi6FeCoTi3O18 and Bi5LaFeCoTi3O18 can be ascribed to spin canting of the Fe-based and Co-based sublattices via the antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. The frequency-dependent behavior of the dielectric loss peak in Bi6FeCoTi3O18 and Bi5LaFeCoTi3O18 manifests itself a thermally activated relaxation process. The rather large activation energy (2.62 +/- 0.11 eV for Bi6FeCoTi3O18 and 1.97 +/- 0.07 eV for Bi5LaFeCoTi3O18) implies that the relaxation process is not due to the thermal motion of oxygen vacancies inside ceramics. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4732526]