Preparation and characterizations of iron oxide nanoparticles.

Recently considerable research has been focused on iron oxides due to their potential uses such as pigment, magnetic drug targeting, magnetic resonance, imaging for clinical diagnosis, recording material and catalyst [1-2]. Much research has been developed to the synthesis of iron oxide nanoparticles (NPs), and many reports have described efficient synthesis approaches to produce the shape controlled, stable, biocompatible, and monodispersed iron oxide NPs. The most common methods including co-precipitation, thermal decomposition, hydrothermal synthesis, micro emulsion, sonochemical synthesis and electrochemical synthesis [3-4]. Magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles have been successfully synthesized by sol–gel method combined with annealing under vacuum. The morphologies, particle sizes, and magnetic properties of Fe3O4 nanoparticles have been characterized field emission scanning electron microscopy(SEM), X-ray diffraction(XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectrometer( FT-IR). The results indicate that the size Fe3O4 nanoparticles increase with the increase of synthesized temperature. Keywords: Magnetic nanoparticles, Sol–gel method, Size.