ELECTROCHIMICA ACTA, cilt.145, ss.132-138, 2014 (SCI-Expanded)
We investigated the electrical properties of ZnGa2O4 via AC (alternating current) Impedance Spectroscopy method comparing with ZnO reference material. Experimentally, AC electrical conductivity of ZnO and ZnGa2O4 were found to be a function of temperature and grain size; i.e., the increase in grain size of the ZnO led a decrease in room temperature conductivity from 1.35 × 10−7 S cm−1 to 9.9 × 10−8 S cm−1. The temperature dependent resistivity variation of ZnGa2O4 and ZnO were similar to each other with varied responding temperature. Likewise, the conductivity for ZnGa2O4decrease from 2.2 × 10−8 S cm−1 to 3.8 × 10−9 S cm−1 upon an increase in grain size from ∼0.5 μm to 100 μm, accordingly. In addition, a rise in temperature caused an increase in conductivity and led to a corresponding shift in the relaxation time towards the lower values. The semicircles in Nyquist plots disappeared at temperature above 250 °C and 700 °C for ZnO and ZnGa2O4, respectively. The AC measurements were also correlated with the size dependent activation energies (171 meV for 0.5 μm ZnO and 1200 meV for 0.5 μm ZnGa2O4).