Rare Earth Based Iron Garnet – A Survey on Its Magnetic Properties

Abstract Garnet is a well-known material for a long-time by the scientific community but still today scientists are focusing on it due to the rapid application-based development of this material. When rare earth iron garnets (REIG) are formed by substituting the rare-earth ions with unfilled 4f n orbitals, the magnetic properties of the iron garnets exhibit an interesting characteristic. For rare earth elements, the 4f electrons are shielded from the crystal field as these are surrounded by 5s , 5p , or 5d orbitals. That is why the exchange field between rare earth ions is much smaller than that between iron-iron and rare earth-iron. The magnetic moment of REIG will be both due to the orbital and spin moment. The magnetization of REIG at different temperatures ( T ) is due to the dominant contribution of different sublattices. At high and low T , the dominant sublattices are iron and rare earth sublattices respectively. The magnetic and non-magnetic ion substitution in REIG also play a very important role in deciding their magnetic property. In this review, we have tried to figure out the basic underlying physics behind the origin of remarkable magnetic behavior in REIG.