Effect of Sm3+ doping on ferroelectric, energy storage and photoluminescence properties of BaTiO3 ceramics

Rare earth doped ferroelectric ceramics have attracted much attention due to their great potential application for novel multifunctional optical-electro devices. Herein, the x% mol Sm3+ doped BaTiO3 (BTO:xSm3+) ceramics were fabricated by the conventional solid-state reaction method. The Sm3+ ions composition dependent phase structure, ferroelectric, energy storage and photoluminescence properties were systematically investigated. With the increase of Sm3+ ions composition, the remanent polarization decreases dramatically from 15.705 μC/cm2 (BTO) to 7.132 μC/cm2 (BTO:3.0%Sm3+), but the energy storage density and efficiency increase greatly with a relative change of 79.76% and 31.13%, respectively. Furthermore, Sm3+ doping causes the transformation from the tetragonal to pseudo-cubic phase for BTO ceramics at room temperature, resulting in a broader temperature transition range from the ferroelectric to paraelectric phase and a lower Curie temperature. Particularly, the pure BTO and BTO:xSm3+ ceramics show great thermal stability for energy storage properties. In addition, under the excitation of 408 nm near-ultraviolet light, the BTO:xSm3+ ceramics exhibit the strongest orange-red emission peak around 596 nm with a large relative tunability of intensity by 88.97%. The results suggest that the BTO:xSm3+ ceramics are suitable for the design of optoelectronic devices.