Facile growth and characterization of α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles for photocatalytic degradation of methyl orange.

In this paper, we report synthesis and characterization of well-crystalline iron oxide (α-Fe2O3) nanoparticles; the synthesis was performed at temperature ~90 °C. The detailed structural and compositional characterizations confirmed the formation of well-crystalline, rhombohedral crystal structure and pure α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles. The magnetic property, however, showed that the synthesized iron oxide nanoparticles are highly super paramagnetic. The as-synthesized Fe2O3 NPs were also utilized as an efficient photocatalysts for the photocatalytic degradation of methyl orange (MO) dye; degradation of MO was observed to be about 80% in the presence of α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles within 210 min under UV-light irradiation.