ORIGINAL PAPER Synthesis and Characterization of Nickel Oxide Nanoparticles from Ni(salen) as Precursor Afsaneh Khansari • Morteza Enhessari • Masoud Salavati-Niasari Received: 23 June 2012 / Published online: 20 January 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract Nickel oxide nanoparticles have been synthesized by thermal treatment of N,N 0 -(bis(salicylidene)-ethylene-1,2-diamine)Nickel(II); [Ni(salen)]; as precursor which has been synthesized via two methods: [Ni(salen)] were obtained by solid state reaction in absence solvent and co-precipitation reaction in presence of pro- panol as solvent, respectively. Nickel oxide nanoparticles were characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Keywords Nickel oxide  Thermal treatment  Nanoparticles  Solid state reaction Introduction As one kind of transition metal oxide, NiO has recently received a great deal of attention due to its applications in various fields such as fabrication of p–n heterojunctions [1], energetic material [2], magnetic properties[3–5], catalysis [6, 7], solar cells [8], gas sensors [9, 10], lithium ion battery [11, 12]. In the past decade, various different physical or chemical synthetic approaches have been developed to produce NiO nanoparticles, including solvo thermal [13, 14], hydro- thermal [15, 16], sol–gel [17, 18], sonochemical method [19, 20], microemulsion A. Khansari Department of Inorganic Chemistry, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Guilan, P. O. Box 413354-1914, Rasht, Islamic Republic of Iran M. Enhessari Islamic Azad University, Naragh Branch, Naragh, Islamic Republic of Iran M. Salavati-Niasari (&) Institute of Nano Science and Nano Technology, University of Kashan, P. O. Box 87317–51167, Kashan, Islamic Republic of Iran e-mail: salavati@kashanu.ac.ir 123 J Clust Sci (2013) 24:289–297 DOI 10.1007/s10876-012-0521-8