Tunable investigation optical, electrical and magnetic behaviors of Gd3+ substituted lanthanum strontium manganite La0.5-x Sr0.5GdxMnO3 nanopowders facilely synthesized through citrate precursor technique.

In this report, gadolinium-substituted lanthanum strontium manganite (LSM) system, La 0.5 Sr 0.5-x Gd x MnO 3 (0.1 ≤ x ≤ 0.4), was synthesized using the citrate precursor processing. The influence of Gd 3+ ions content on the structure, optical, electrochemical and magnetic properties of LSM was studied. Evidently, in all compositions, a single monoclinic perovskite phase was obtained after calcination at 1000 °C for 2 h. All powders exhibited crystallite sizes in the range of 25.6–35.1 nm. The formed LSM nanopowders has great optical reflectance of 20–40% from 200 to 800 nm for all substituted samples by Gd 3+ ions. Furthermore, the LSM possesses good optical absorbance of 0.65 from 200 to 800 nm. The optical band gap energy was decreased from 2.45 to 1.63 eV by increasing the Gd 3+ ions molar ratios from 0.1 to 0.4. Meanwhile, the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy displayed the good results. The ohmic resistance ( R s) and the polarization resistance ( R p) of the electrode were increased by increasing the Gd 3+ ions concentration from 0.1 to 0.4. Otherwise, both the ohmic resistance ( R s) and polarization resistance in the doped samples were higher than the pure LSM sample. Finally, the saturation magnetization was increased by increasing Gd 3+ ions molar ratios. The saturation magnetization was found to be increased from 1.61 A m 2 /kg for pure LSM to 28.61 A m 2 /kg for 0.4 Gd 3+ ion substituted LSM sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]