Influence of A-site doping barium on structure,magnetic and microwave absorption properties of LaFeO3 ceramics powders

In this paper, the effect of Ba²⁺ ions A-site doping LaFeO₃ on structure, magnetic properties and microwave absorption properties was investigated by the sol–gel method. According to the TEM and FullProf refinement results, the structure of LaFeO₃ changes from orthogonal (SG: Pnma) to cubic (SG: Pm-3m) when the Ba doping amount is x = 0.4. The SEM image shows that the particles size tends to decrease with the increase of Ba content. The production of weak ferromagnetism indicates that Ba doping has a significant effect on the magnetic properties of LaFeO₃. The Neel temperature (T_N) decreases significantly with the increase of Ba doping amount. An appropriate amount of Ba doping can effectively increase the dielectric and magnetic loss of LaFeO₃ ceramics powders. The increase permittivity (ε′ and ε″) may be attributed to the hopping of the electrons between the Fe³⁺ and Fe⁴⁺ ions with the Ba²⁺ ions doping. The minimum reflection loss (RL_min) of La_0.9Ba_0.1FeO₃ at 6.72 GHz reaches ?30.04 dB, its effective bandwidth (RL ≤ ?10 dB) is 2.1 GHz, and the matching thickness is only 3.2 mm. These results indicate that Ba doping can effectively control the microwave absorption properties of LaFeO₃, especially in the C-band.