The influence of cobalt (Co) doping on the electrical and dielectric properties of LaCr1-xCoxO3 perovskite-oxide compounds

We synthesized LaCr1-xCoxO3 (x = 0, 0.01, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.30) compounds by solid-state reaction method. SEM and EDX analyses were carried out to study their structural and chemical properties. Furthermore, their electrical/dielectric properties including real and imaginary part of dielectric function, real and imaginary part of impedance, conductivity, were investigated at wide temperature (between -100 degrees C and 100 degrees C) and frequency range (1 Hz-10(7) Hz) by using Broadband Impedance Spectroscopy (Novocontrol). Temperature dependent power law exponent, s, showed that different conduction mechanisms need to be considered to study the conduction in the investigated samples. The calculated activation energies from the conductivity varied between 0.170 eV and 0.388 eV indicating that the oxygen vacancies and small polaron hopping conduction taken place in the samples. Moreover, the Nyquist plots demonstrated that grain and grain boundary relaxations happen in the investigated specimens.