A Study of NanoTitanium Dioxide-Silver Ferrite Composite: Synthesis, Characterization, and Band Gap Evaluation

Multiferroic materials are the materials that exhibit both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric phases. This type of phenomenon is rare in materials and so the coupling of these properties is useful to change the magnetic ordering of materials by applying electric field and to change the electric polarization of materials by applying magnetic field. These are novel materials of having a variety of applications such as microwave components, energy harvesters, photovoltaics, data storage devices. In this paper, we made a study on two different methods of synthesis of titanium dioxide-silver ferrite nanocomposite. The characterization reveals that the hybrid nanocomposite particles of sizes less than 100 nm with homogeneous silver ferrite distribution on nanoTiO2 and also coexistence of orthorhombic silver ferrite on tetragonal rutileTiO2 in both synthetic approaches. The band gaps of this nanocomposites are evaluated by UV–visible spectroscopy while the magnetic properties are from VSM. Results shows there is decrease in the band gap, ferroelectric, and ferromagnetic behaviors. Hence, the synthesized TiO2-AgFeO2 nanocomposite is multiferroic magnetoelectric material. Therefore, it may be a promising candidate for photo catalysis, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, and nanoscale magnetic storage devices.