A comparative study of electric properties of nano-structured and bulk Mn-Mg spinel ferrite

A series of nano-sized particles of Mn(1-x)Mg(x)Fe(2)O(4) (x = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2 and 0.25) have been synthesized by co-precipitation method. The effect of Mg-substitution on structural and dielectric properties is reported in this paper. X-ray diffraction analysis for both nanosize and bulk samples revealed the nanocrystalline nature in the prepared ferrite samples. The crystallite size increases from 3-6 nm in nanosamples to 63.9-85.5 nm in bulk samples. The dielectric properties for all the samples have been studied as a function of frequency in the range 10-10(5) Hz at different temperatures. Dielectric properties such as dielectric constant (epsilon') dielectric loss (epsilon `'), dielectric loss tangent (tan delta) and ac conductivity have been studied for the investigated samples as a function of frequency. The data indicated that, the dielectric constant and the loss factor values of our former are ten orders of magnitude than those of the later. The low dielectric behavior makes ferrite materials useful in high frequency applications. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd and Techna Group S.r.l. All rights reserved.