Magnetic properties of polypyrrole - coated iron oxide nanoparticles

TL;DR

This study synthesizes iron oxide nanoparticles coated with polypyrrole via in situ polymerization, analyzing their structure and magnetic properties, and confirming superparamagnetic behavior with reduced agglomeration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel nanocomposite synthesis method and provides detailed structural and magnetic characterization, including numerical simulations for anisotropy estimation.

Findings

Presence of gamma-iron oxide and polypyrrole confirmed by XRD and FTIR

Coated nanoparticles show reduced agglomeration in TEM images

Superparamagnetic behavior confirmed by AC susceptibility measurements

Abstract

Iron oxide nanoparticles were prepared by sol -gel process. Insitu polymerization of pyrrole monomer in the presence of oxygen in iron oxide ethanol suspension resulted in a iron oxide - polypyrrole nanocomposite. The structure and magnetic properties were investigated for varying pyrrole concentrations. The presence of the gamma - iron oxide phase and polypyrrole were confirmed by XRD and FTIR respectively. Agglomeration was found to be comparatively much reduced for the coated samples, as shown by TEM. AC susceptibility measurements confirmed the superparamagnetic behaviour. Numerical simulations performed for an interacting model system are performed to estimate the anisotropy and compare favourably with experimental results.