Multifunctional magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications

Abstract

This thesis at the start of the chapter gives short introduction to the field of nanoscience. We have presented though brief but a critical review of literature on magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical application. Besides this, we have stated the objective and motivation behind this work and discussion of work in the subsequent chapters. The second chapter presents a brief description of various wet chemical synthetic routes, used for obtaining monodispersed nanoparticles. Brief discussions on various experimental tools were employed to characterize the synthesized nanoparticles for structural, optical and magnetic properties. In the final chapter we present a simple strategy to achieve nearly monodispersed γ-Fe2O3 nanoparticles by a thermal decomposition method utilizing a strong polar organic solvent, at much lower temperature of 200oC. We demonstrate a generic approach to form stable dispersions of magnetic nanoparticles in both aqueous and non-aqueous media by appropriate surface functionalities. The amine functionalized magnetic nanoparticles enable the covalent conjugation of a fluorescent dye, which facilitates the use of these magnetic nanoparticles in biomedical applications.