Nanoparticle agglomerates in magnetoliposomes.

Magnetoliposomes consist of vesicles composed of a phospholipid membrane encapsulating magnetic nanoparticles. These systems have several important applications, such as in MRI contrast agents, drug and gene carriers, and cancer treatment devices. For all of these applications, controlling the number of encapsulated magnetic nanoparticles is a key issue. In this work, we used a magneto-optical technique to obtain information about the efficiency of encapsulation, the number of nanoparticles encapsulated per liposome and also about the formation of the nanoparticle structures. The parameters studied included the effect of the duration of sonication, the presence of cholesterol in the liposome membrane, as well as time-related stability. For the liposomal vesicles prepared in this work, we found between 35 and 300 nanoparticles encapsulated per liposome, depending on the experimental conditions, consisting of small linear chains of nanoparticles, basically trimers and tetramers. The methodology developed might be useful for the investigation and improvement of the properties of several magnetic nanocarrier systems.

Annealing effects on 5 nm iron oxide nanoparticles.

Morphological, structural and magnetic properties of 4.8 nm iron oxide nanoparticles have been investigated after annealing under inert atmosphere at different temperatures. The as-prepared iron oxide nanoparticles have been synthesized by chemical route from high temperature reaction of Fe(acac)3 solution in presence of oleic acid and oleylamine surfactant. Annealing the particles at low temperatures (Tann = 573 K) produces an increment of the mean size from 4.8 nm to 6.0 nm, preserving the same morphology. The coercive field of the annealed sample has a small increasing with respect to the as-prepared sample in agreement with the mean particle volume change. Annealing at higher temperature (Tann = 823 K) leads to a bimodal size distribution of the iron oxide nanoparticles with 6.0 nm and 17 nm mean sizes respectively, where the bigger particles dominate the observed magnetic properties.