Fabrication of 3-D hybrid polymer-magnetite nanostructures with geometric shape anisotropy

This paper reports fabrication of three-dimensional (3-D) hybrid polymer-magnetite nanoparticles with designed asymmetric shapes. The fabrication strategy exploited in this work is to fabricate nanotemplates for positional assembly of target water soluble polystyrene (PS) and iron-oxide (Fe₃O₄) nanoparticles, producing 3-D hybrid nanostructures as designed. This work has demonstrated 3-D asymmetric PS-(Fe₃O₄) composite nanostructures (e.g. “nano-broccoli-flowers”) with a feature size of sub-20 nm exhibiting ferromagnetic properties. Such magnetic 3-D asymmetric nanostructures may have specific advantages over 0-D symmetric spherical counterparts due to their geometric anisotropy, for example offering additional design freedom for nanoparticle functionality in biomedical and clinical applications.