Abstract
High permeability and low losses at low frequency are significant features of manganese copper ferrites. These properties could be exploited efficiently provided the samples are grown phase pure without the presence of any impurities. In this work, a series of ferrite samples have been synthesized using a novel and low cost sol-gel auto-combustion route in order to get pure ferrite samples and to investigate systematically its spectroscopic and microscopic properties. The effect of zinc substitution at copper site on the chemical bonding of the ferrite samples was investigated by Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy. Energy dispersive X-ray analysis was performed to determine the homogeneity and stoichiometric composition of elements present in the samples. Nano-sized, uniformly shaped grains were evident from the images obtained using a scanning electron microscopy, which indirectly confirms the significance of auto-combustion synthesis technique employed in this work.