Unexpected Insights about Cation-Exchange on Metal Oxide Nanoparticles and Its Effect on Their Magnetic Behavior
Type
ArticleKAUST Department
Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering (BESE) DivisionBioscience Program
Date
2018-10-22Online Publication Date
2018-10-22Print Publication Date
2018-11-13Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/630189
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Show full item recordAbstract
Tuning the magnetic behavior of nanoparticles via the control of their features has always been challenging because these features are mostly intertwined. In the last years, a novel synthetic approach based on cation-exchange has been reported, and one of its main advantages is to maintain the shape and size of nanoparticles. However, such a synthetic strategy has been seldom applied to iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles, where the substitution of iron with diverse transition element cations was described as occurring in their whole volume. Surprisingly, we found results quite discordant from the few ones so far published in exploiting again this approach. We show here that it unavoidably leads to core/shell structures with only the shell undergoing the cation-exchange. Moreover, the starting phase of iron oxide strongly dictates the number of iron cations that could be replaced: if it is structurally free of vacancies, like magnetite, the maximum amount of exchanged cations is low and only affects the nanoparticles' most external, disordered layers. Conversely, the cation-exchange is boosted if the iron oxide phase is structurally prone to vacancies, like wüstite, and the shell where the iron cations have been partly substituted becomes quite thicker. These findings are further corroborated by the materials' magnetic properties.Citation
Lentijo-Mozo S, Deiana D, Sogne E, Casu A, Falqui A (2018) Unexpected Insights about Cation-Exchange on Metal Oxide Nanoparticles and Its Effect on Their Magnetic Behavior. Chemistry of Materials 30: 8099–8112. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.8b04331.Sponsors
Table of contents graphic was produced by Heno Hwang, scientific illustrator at KAUST, who is gratefully acknowledged. Mr. Efisio Zuddas, who participated to the preparation of some samples, is also thankfully acknowledged.Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)Journal
Chemistry of MaterialsAdditional Links
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.8b04331ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1021/acs.chemmater.8b04331