Thermal frequency shift and tunable microwave absorption in BiFeO3 family.

Tunable frequency is highly sought-after task of researcher, because of the potential for applications in selecting frequency, absorber, imaging and biomedical diagnosis. Here, we report the original observation of thermal frequency shift of dielectric relaxation in La/Nd doped BiFeO3 (BFO) in X-band from 300 to 673 K. It exhibits an unexpected result: the relaxation shifts to lower frequency with increasing temperature. The relaxation maximally shifts about a quarter of X-band. The nonlinear term of lattice vibration plays an important role in the frequency shift. The frequency shift leads to tuning microwave absorption, which almost covers the whole X-band by changing temperature. Meanwhile, the great increase of dielectric loss of La/Nd doped BFO due to thermal excited electron hopping enhances microwave absorption above ~460 and ~480 K, respectively. The microwave absorption of La/Nd doped BFO surpasses -20 dB at 673 K, and the minimum reflection loss of La doped BFO reaches -39 dB. These results open a new pathway to develop BFO-based materials in electromagnetic functional materials and devices for tunable frequency, stealth and thermal imaging at long wavelength.