ZnO/ZnFe₂O₄ magnetic fluorescent bifunctional hollow nanospheres: Synthesis, characterization, and their optical/magnetic properties

Uniform ZnO/ZnFe₂O₄ fluorescent magnetic composite hollow nanopsheres can be successfully fabricated using carbonaceous nanospheres as templates, which are synthesized via a hydrothermal approach. The ZnO/ZnFe₂O₄ composited nanoarchitectures show fluorescent and magnetic properties for improved physical and chemical properties for electronics, magnetism, optics, and catalysis compared with their single counterparts and may find potential applications in many fields, such as catalyst supports, catalysis, drug delivery, chemical/biological separation, sensing, and so on. This method may be extended to synthesize some other binary/ternary metal oxide composite hollow nanoarchitectures.