Reverse Micelle Synthesis of Iron-Gold Core-Shell (Fe@Au) Nanoparticles Functionalized with Polyglycidol for Drug Delivery Application

The properties of iron nanoparticles have been studied extensively both experimentally and theoretically. Although these particles are promising candidate for various applications such as magnetic recording, mag-netic fluids, medical imaging, drug targeting and delivery, and cancer therapy and separations, their utility has been limited due to uncontrolled oxidation [1]. One method for controlling the oxidation is to coat the particles, creating a core-shell structure [1,2]. Gold is a favored coating material for iron because of a simple synthetic procedure and its chemical functionality [3]. It has been found that the oxidation of iron nanoparti-cles can be avoided by gold coating without degradation of their magnetic properties [2,3]. Reverse micelle has been found of interest for synthesizing metallic core/shell nanoparticles [4]. Besides the simplicity of the method, many parameters influence the size, morphology and size distribution of the nanoparticles and eventually their properties and functionality. The aim of this work is to study the effect of water to surfactant molar ratio (w) on the size distribution of iron nanoparticles coated with a nanometric gold layer [5]. The synthesized core/shell particles were coated by polyglycidol to functionalize it for drug delivery application