Synthesis of magnetic hollow silica using polystyrene bead as a template

In this paper, we report a new route to synthesize novel magnetic hollow silica nanospheres (MHSNs) using polystyrene particles as sacrificial templates, and TEOS and Fe3O4 as precursors. TEM, EDS, XRD, and SQUID were applied to characterize MHSNs. TEM and EDS results show that the MHSNs consist of about 200 nm of hollow cores and ∼35 nm shells with ∼10 nm of Fe3O4 nanoparticles embedded. The polystyrene beads were successfully removed by immersing the as-prepared silica nanocomposite in a toluene solution. XRD results demonstrate that the Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles still keep spinel structure even heated at low temperature. The surface status of the polystyrene beads and Fe3O4 nanoparticles has an important effect on the formation of the MHSNs. The MHSNs present a superparamagnetism at room temperature by SQUID measurement. The MHSNs have potential applications in biosystem and nanomedicine.