Addition and correction

Bio-milling technique for the size reduction of chemically synthesized BiMnO₃ nanoplates

Baishakhi Mazumder, Imran Uddin, Shadab Khan, Venkat Ravi, Kaliaperumal Selvraj, Pankaj Poddar and Absar Ahmad

J. Mater. Chem., 2007, 17, 3910–3914 (DOI: 10.1039/b706154d). Amendment published 5th December 2007.

Recently, we reported a novel bio-milling technique where we showed that it was possible to reduce the size of the chemically synthesized particles into nanoparticles with size as small as 5 nm using a microbial process.¹ In this article, we identified the particles synthesized by the wet-chemical method (synthesis procedure reported in a separate study) as perovskite BiMnO₃.² Our study was based on reacting the as-synthesized particles with fungus to demonstrate that over a period of time, fungus could actually break down the bigger particles into smaller ones, a mechanism which is common in nature.

In this article, the phase identification of the material used as a model system for bio-milling—BiMnO₃—was based on the previous reported work which originally reported the synthesis of the material.^1,2 However after a careful analysis using the JCPDS database, it was later found that the phase reported by us in this article is probably BiOCl instead of BiMnO₃. Other scientific details of the article remain unchanged (such as the bio-milling, protein analysis, etc.). Our previous structural analysis was due to the similarities in several XRD peaks of our data with the BiMnO₃ as shown in the figure below.^2,3 Texturing effects due to the plate-like particles were also thought to contribute in reduction of the peak intensities of some of the major peaks.¹ The material BiOCl (bismuth oxide chloride) has tetragonal structure (space group: P4/nmm) with lattice constants: a = b = 3.89 Å and c = 7.37 Å. In the figure below, we have compared the XRD data of as-synthesized BiOCl nanoplates (panel A) with the BiMnO₃ (panel B) and BiOCl XRD profiles as obtained from the JCPDS files 89-4544 and 85-0861 respectively. The lattice planes in the HRTEM images of the bio-milled nanoparticles (Fig. 6), reported in the article by Mazumder et al., were re-indexed to the lattice planes <212> and <113> corresponding to the lattice spacings of ~1.57 Å and 1.83 Å (±0.03 Å) respectively.¹

Figure Comparison between the powder XRD profiles (A) reported in Mazumder et al., J. Mater. Chem., 2007, 17, 3910 for as synthesized particles; (B) reference peaks for the BiMnO₃ phase taken from JCPDS file 89-4544; (C) reference peaks for the BiOCl phase taken from JCPDS file 85-0861.

References

1 B. Mazumder, I. Uddin, S. Khan, V. Ravi, K. Selvraj, P. Poddar and A. Ahmad, J. Mater. Chem., 2007, 17, 3910.

2 V. Samuel, S. C. Navale, A. D. Jadhav, A. B. Gaikwad and V. Ravi, Mater. Lett., 2007, 61, 1050.

3 H. Chiba, T. Atou, H. Faqir, M. Kikuchi, Y. Syono, Y. Murakami and D. Shindo, Solid State Ionics, 1998, 108, 193–199.

The Royal Society of Chemistry apologises for these errors and any consequent inconvenience to authors and readers.

Back to article