Terbium (III) Oxide (Tb2O3) Transparent Ceramics by Two-Step Sintering from Precipitated Powder
, Penghui Chen 1,2, Zhengfa Dai 1, Stanislav Balabanov 5, Oleg Palashov 3,4 and Jiang Li 1,2,*
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
“Terbium (III) oxide (Tb2O3) transparent ceramics by two-step sintering from precipitated powder” follows the MDPI's template.
The text is flowing. The introduction is rich in information leading you to understand the topic and the need to be studied.
Line 51; 53; 54: In my opinion I would I reformulate the sentence so as to avoid repetition of “ceramics”.
The method is explained as well as the results are rich in explanations, coherent details.
I would recommend natural typo errors check.
Author Response
Responds: Thanks for your valuable suggestion. The corresponding sentence has been reformulated to avoid repetition of “ceramics”, and typo errors have been checked and corrected. Changes have been made in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is devoted to the synthesis of terbia optical ceramics. At present, this is the most promising material for magneto-optical applications in the 1 μm region and its development is undoubtedly topical. The change in the oxidation degree of terbium significantly complicates the development of methods for obtaining the initial powders and compacts, sintering and posttreatment. The main novelty of the paper lies in the method of Tb2O3 nanopowder synthesis. The method is described in detail and the necessary measurements to characterize the powder and intermediate products are carried out. I believe that the paper in its present form can be published in Magnetochemistry with the following correction.
The particle size distribution histogram (Fig. 4d) is plotted by frequency. I propose to build this dependence by the volume, since for ceramic technology such a distribution is more relevant.
Author Response
Responds: Thanks for your valuable suggestion. For the dynamic light scattering (DLS) method, the particle size distribution is usually plotted by the volume (volume fraction or differential volume) as you suggested. Nevertheless, the Figure 4 (d) in our manuscript is obtained by counting the diameters of at least 300 particles in the FESEM micrographs by using a statistical method, thanks to the Nano Measure software, rather than the DLS method. So, we think it may be more appropriate to use the “percentage” to plot the particle size distribution histogram in this case. Changes have been made in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 3 Report
In the manuscript entitled “Terbium (III) oxide (Tb2O3) transparent ceramics by two-step sintering from precipitated powder”, the authors demonstrated high Verdet constants with good optical quality from Tb2O3ceramics. Although the authors claim a high level of novelty, I observed that results in this work are only incremental when contrasted with the available literature. Indeed, I noticed that this issue could be due to the unappropriated self-citation level (around 50% of the references), which limits the scope of this work to the successive achievements of a research group more than to the scientific community working in the area of magneto-optical ceramic materials. Therefore, I concluded that this work is not suitable for publication in the present form, which would only be of interest to a limited research group(s). However, I think that results in this work are publishable if the authors improve the introduction and discussions, contrasting their results with the widely available literature, i.e., reducing the level of self-citations. Moreover, several typos along the manuscript should be verified.
Author Response
Responds: Thanks for your valuable suggestion. In this work, Tb2O3 nano-powder with high sintering ability were synthesized and Tb2O3 ceramics without any rare earth ion dopant realized full-dense and transparent under the phase transition temperature (~1600 oC), which was different from the reported approaches. Corrections have been made to the reference list and more widely available references have been added in the revision. The introduction and discussions section have been improved to better demonstrate the novelty of this work. Grammatical and typographical errors have been revised in the re-submitted manuscript.
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have addressed all my previous concerns. Changes made in the text provide the readers with a better understanding of the novelty and original contribution in this work. I recommend publication in its present form.
