Insights into the magnetic properties of sub-10 nm iron oxide nanocrystals through the use of a continuous growth synthesis

Most studies on iron oxide nanocrystals (NCs) suggest that the magnetic properties depend strongly on size for diameters below 10 nm, but there is less agreement about how the structure of the NC surface influences magnetic properties. Because the magnetic properties of iron oxide NCs hold promise for applications from cancer detection and therapeutics to environmental remediation, it is imperative to understand how size influences those properties. In most cases, the effective magnetic size is significantly lower than the measured physical size, a finding attributed to spin canting or disorder at the NC surface. A complicating factor is that the reaction conditions used to produce samples influence their magnetic properties. Thus, we employed a continuous growth method involving layer-by-layer addition of precursor to produce single-crystalline, spherical cores with subnanometer precision over a range of sizes under the same reaction conditions. Analysis of the NCs by small-angle X-ray scattering, transm...