Contents I. Introduction
Over past ten years or so, there was a resurge of interest on the multiferroic materials in which both ferroelectric and (anti-)ferromagnetic domains coexist [1], [2]. Except for the significance in the study of fundamental physics, the coupling between ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism in a pure material provides an extra degree of freedom for the designing of multistate memories, sensors, spin filters, etc. [3]. However, the high magnetic field (>1 Tesla) required to achieve such a coupling is a practical obstacle yet to be overcome. More recently, magnetodielectric (MD) effect has attracted a great deal of attentions because some rare-earth iron garnets (RIG), e.g. , showed a very large MD response at a much lower field (<2 kOe) [4] and therefore were more viable for device applications. As a member of the RIG family which has a variety of applications in the magnetic and magneto-optical devices, such as oscillators, circulators, phase shifters, etc. [5], the magnetic properties of have been studied extensively, but there is little known about its dielectric properties. In this work, high-purity polycrystalline samples were prepared by the solid-state reaction method and the effects of processing parameters on their dielectric behaviors were studied in detail.
