Multifunctional metallosurfactants: a simple way to nanomaterials and low-dimensional magnets
Principal investigator
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In today's fast-tracked technological progress, the development of cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and multifunctional materials, and thus the pursuit of innovative solutions in materials science, has become of utmost importance. Due to their unique physico-chemical properties, both in solution and in the solid state, surfactants offer numerous possibilities in this development. The class of surfactants that has drawn much attention in the last decade is metallosurfactants. Metallosurfactants are a class of compounds that combine the properties of traditional, conventional surfactants with those of metal-containing complexes by incorporating a transition and/or inner-transition metal as an integral structural element. The incorporation of metal in the surfactant's molecular structures offers several new properties, such as variable oxidation states, magnetism, and pH sensitivity. Therefore, the main objectives of the proposed project are to design and synthesize structurally different metallosurfactants (monomeric, dimeric, and double-chain) with selected transition metals (Fe, Co, Ni, Cu) in order to obtain simple-to-produce, cost-effective, multifunctional metallosurfactants with improved self-assembly and solution properties by establishing an optimal structure-property relationship. Considering that surfactant ions play a key role in the stabilization of nanostructures, the goal is to optimize the simple, environmentally friendly synthesis of metallic nanoparticles (NPs) from synthesized metallosurfactants as metal precursors. Synthesized metallosurfactants and metallic NPs will be further tested for catalysing the reduction reaction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol. But most importantly, proposed project aims to explore metallosurfactants as a simple approach for the design and synthesis of novel low-dimensional magnetic systems of great potential for future spintronic and optoelectronic devices.