Study on the physico-chemical properties, magnetic phase resolution and cytotoxicity behavior of chitosan-coated cobalt ferrite nanocubes

Abstract

In this work, single-phase cobalt ferrite nanocubes are successfully synthesized by hydrothermal method, and their surface is modified with biocompatible polymer chitosan. The effect of chitosan coating on the structure, morphology, magnetic, and cytotoxicity properties of CoFe2O4 nanoparticles is scientifically studied. XRD and XPS studies of bare and chitosan-coated samples confirmed the formation of the cubic spinel CoFe2O4 nanoparticles. HR-TEM revealed that the chitosan-coated CoFe2O4 nanoparticles are uniformly dispersed with a narrow particle size distribution and the average particle size obtained corresponds to that obtained from the XRD data. The bonding of chitosan onto the surface of CoFe2O4 nanoparticles is confirmed by both XPS and FT-IR spectroscopy. The room temperature M-H curve and the well-defined sextet patterns in the Mössbauer spectra confirm the ferromagnetic nature of the synthesized samples. The cation distributions obtained from the Mössbauer and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy are well matched, which confirms the mixed spinel structure of the samples. Curve fitting using experimental M-H data can resolve the contribution of various magnetic phases such as ferromagnetic, superparamagnetic, and paramagnetic, which matches the magnetic properties obtained by Mössbauer analysis. Cytotoxicity studies have shown that the cytotoxicity of chitosan-coated CoFe2O4 nanoparticles is insignificant than bare samples.