Synthesis of raspberry-like monodisperse magnetic hollow hybrid nanospheres by coating polystyrene template with Fe3O4@SiO2 particles

Abstract In this paper, we present a novel method for the preparation of raspberry-like monodisperse magnetic hollow hybrid nanospheres with γ-Fe 2 O 3 @SiO 2 particles as the outer shell. PS@Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 composite nanoparticles were successfully prepared on the principle of the electrostatic interaction between negatively charged silica and positively charged polystyrene, and then raspberry-like magnetic hollow hybrid nanospheres with large cavities were achieved by means of calcinations, simultaneously, the magnetite (Fe 3 O 4 ) was transformed into maghemite (γ-Fe 2 O 3 ). Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) demonstrated that the obtained magnetic hollow silica nanospheres with the perfect spherical profile were well monodisperse and uniform with the mean size of 253 nm. The Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometry, energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) provided the sufficient evidences for the presence of Fe 3 O 4 in the silica shell. Moreover, the magnetic hollow silica nanospheres possessed a characteristic of superparamagnetic with saturation magnetization value of about 7.84 emu/g by the magnetization curve measurement. In addition, the nitrogen adsorption–desorption measurement exhibited that the pore size, BET surface area, pore volume of magnetic hollow silica nanospheres were 3.5–5.5 nm, 307 m 2  g −1 and 1.33 cm 3  g −1 , respectively. Therefore, the magnetic hollow nanospheres possess a promising future in controlled drug delivery and targeted drug applications.