Photocatalytic, optical and magnetic properties of Fe-doped ZnO nanoparticles prepared by chemical route

•Zn1-xFexO nanoparticles are synthesized using bottom-up wet chemical precipitation technique.•Photocatalytic activity was evaluated by monitoring the photodegradation of methylene blue dye.•Specific magnetization values of the synthesized materials are found to depend on Fe concentration. Polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) capped Zn1−xFexO (0.000001⩽x⩽0.1) nanocrystalline powders were prepared by chemical co-precipitation technique. Structural, optical and magnetic characterizations of the annealed samples were performed using X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM), energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, UV–visible spectrophotometry, photoluminescence (PL) and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) measurements. XRD and TEM studies reveal that the synthesized ZnO nanocrystals have hexagonal wurtzite structure with average crystalline size ∼8–15nm. EDXRF and FTIR measurements confirmed the doping and incorporation of Fe impurities in ZnO nanostructures. Photocatalytic efficiency of the synthesized samples was determined by degradation of methylene blue (MB) dye in aqueous solution under UV/sunlight exposure. The dependence of photocatalytic behavior and luminescence efficiency on the dopant concentration was studied in detail. Magnetic measurements performed at room temperature show that pure ZnO exhibits diamagnetic behavior, ferromagnetic order was clearly observed at minute concentration of Fe impurity (at 0.000010%) and large concentration of dopant (at 10%) leads to strong paramagnetic component in all the Fe-doped ZnO samples.