Effect of acetylacetone on the preparation of PZT materials in sol–gel processing

Sol–gel processing is an advantageous route to produce PZT thin film materials with high quality. PZT powders and thin films with good properties were fabricated by sol–gel processing, using acetylacetone as modifier, in the study. The morphologies of PZT powders and thin films were observed by field emission microscopy, and the dielectric and properties of the PZT thin films were measured. Thermal analysis, XRD and FTIR were used to investigate the influence of ligands on the phase transformation in PZT materials, and it is found that the difficulty of decomposing acetylacetone ligands completely resulted in a higher pyrolysis temperature to form PZT with pure phase.