One-step cathodic electrosynthesis of surface capped Fe3O4 ultra-fine nanoparticles from ethanol medium without using coating agent

Abstract In this letter, a simple and efficient cathodic electrosynthesis (CE) platform is reported for preparation of magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs). In this procedure, surface capped MNPs (with size of ∼10 nm) were prepared from the Fe(III)nitrate/ethanol bath through CE process without using any coating agent. The prepared MNPs were characterized by different techniques of XRD, FE-SEM, TEM, FT-IR, TGA, DLS and VSM. It was found that solvent act as capping agent during the CE process, where surface of the deposited MNPs are capped with ethoxy groups i.e. -C2H5O. The VSM data proved superparamagnetic behavior of the prepared MNPs (i.e. Ms = 44.84 emu g−1, Mr = 0.21 emu g−1 and Ce = 1.38 Oe). The obtained results implied that the developed CE strategy is an effective one-pot method for preparation of surface capped MNPs.