Growth, structural and magnetic characterization of Zn-substituted barium hexaferrite single crystals

Zn-doped barium hexaferrite BaFe12−xZnxO19 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.065) single crystals were grown from carbonate flux at temperatures below 1260 °C in order to study the effect of Zn-substitution on the structural and magnetic properties. Upon increasing Zn-content the lattice parameters increase to a small degree, due to a larger ionic size of Zn2+ as compared to Fe3+. The saturation magnetization and coercivity of the studied crystals turns out to depend very sensitive on the level of Zn-substitution. A considerable coercivity decrease up to 30% was observed for samples with x = 0.065, while the Curie temperature was found to be comparably little influenced, dropping from 455 °C for the undoped compound to 445 °C for the maximum x obtained. We demonstrate the possibility to use the carbonate flux growth method for producing hexaferrite crystals and tune their functional properties via doping with zinc.