Gd³⁺ doped Mn-Zn soft ferrite nanoparticles: Superparamagnetism and its correlation with other physical properties

Highlights: • Superparamagnetic nanoparticles of Gd doped Mn-Zn spinel ferrites synthesized by co-precipitation. • XRD and FTIR studies justify the formation of cubical spinel structure. • Maximum saturation magnetization and magnetic moment at x = 0.025. • PL spectra shows blue shift for x = 0.025, 0.075 and may be attributed to quantum confinement. - Abstract: Superparamagnetic nanoparticles are very important in biomedicine due to their various applications like drug delivery, gene delivery in the body and also used for hyperthermia. In the present work, superparamagnetic nanoparticles of Mn_0.5Zn_0.5Gd_xFe_2-xO₄ (x = 0, 0.025, 0.050, 0.075, 0.1) ferrites have been prepared by co-precipitation method. Thorough characterizations (XRD, FTIR, FE-SEM, EDS, VSM and fluorescence spectroscopy) have proved the formation of cubical spinel superparamagnetic nanoparticles of soft ferrites. A cation distribution has been proposed for the determination of various important theoretical parameters for these samples. With the addition of Gd³⁺ nanoparticles have shown the superparamagnetism at room temperature confirmed by VSM analysis. Photoluminescence (PL) spectra shows a blue shift (for x = 0.025, 0.075) which may be due to quantum confinement.