CoFe and CoFe@SiO Nanospheres with Tunable Diameters for High-Performance Electromagnetic Wave Absorption.

Ferromagnetic metal/alloy nanoparticles have attracted extensive interest for electromagnetic wave-absorbing applications. However, ferromagnetic nanoparticles are prone to oxidization and producing eddy currents, leading to the deterioration of electromagnetic properties. In this work, a simple and scalable liquid-phase reduction method was employed to synthesize uniform CoFe nanospheres with diameters ranging from 350 to 650 nm for high-performance microwave absorption application. CoFe@SiO core-shell nanospheres with SiO shell thicknesses of 30 nm were then fabricated via a modified Stöber method. When tested as microwave absorbers, bare CoFe nanospheres with a diameter of 350 nm have a maximum reflection loss (RL) of 78.4 dB and an effective absorption with RL > 10 dB from 10 to 16.7 GHz at a small thickness of 1.59 mm. CoFe@SiO nanospheres showed a significantly enhanced microwave absorption capability for an effective absorption bandwidth and a shift toward a lower frequency, which is ascribed to the protection of the SiO shell from direct contact among CoFe nanospheres, as well as improved crystallinity and decreased defects upon annealing. This work illustrates a simple and effective method to fabricate CoFe and CoFe@SiO nanospheres as promising microwave absorbers, and the design concept can also be extended to other ferromagnetic alloy particles.