Chem Sci Trans., 2013, 2(S1), S153-S156 Chemical Science Transactions DOI:10.7598/cst2013.34 ISSN/E-ISSN: 2278-3458/2278-3318 Synthesis and Characterization of Fe-Ag Alloy by Pulsed Electrodeposition† T. A. REVATHY a , KALAVATHY SANTHI a,c , V. NARAYANAN b and A. STEPHEN a* a Department of Nuclear Physics, University of Madras, Guindy Campus, Chennai-600025, Tamilnadu, India b Department of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Madras, Guindy Campus, Chennai-600025, Tamilnadu, India c Department of Physics, Women’s Christian College, Chennai-6, Tamilnadu, India stephen_arum@hotmail.com Received 2 February 2013 / Accepted 15 February 2013 Abstract: An alloy of the immiscible constituents iron and silver was prepared by pulsed electrodeposition method from a single bath containing ferric nitrate, silver nitrate and sodium perchlorate. The surface morphology of the as deposited alloys was investigated by using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) analysis while the crystal structure was examined by X-ray diffraction analysis. XRD analysis showed that alloy exhibits fcc structure. FESEM analysis depicted the formation of dendrites over the spherical particles. The vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) study unveiled that the Fe-Ag alloy deposits were ferromagnetic in nature and Curie temperature was found to be 585.4 °C. Keywords: Fe-Ag alloy, ferromagnetic alloy, Pulsed electrodeposition Introduction Magnetic alloys prepared from groups of magnetic and non magnetic materials plays an important role in material science due to their enhanced physical properties, such as giant magnetoresistance, superparamagnetism. Moreover, they have important technological applications in magnetic recording, in optical devices and in sensors 1 . Fe-Ag alloy is such a two-component alloy system consisting of magnetic iron and nonmagnetic silver metal. Iron can form alloys or solid solutions with almost any metal, while there are a few metallic elements with which iron is immiscible. Ag is one such example metal. Their solubility in both liquid and solid state is less than 1% 2 . However, in recent years, it has been shown that metastable and homogeneous alloys of Fe–Ag system can be formed by using many special techniques 3-5 . Depending on the preparation technique these metastable alloys are stable up to few hundred degree above room temperature. Among them electrodeposition has several advantages over other methods as it is simple to assemble and operate, is quite inexpensive. †Presented to the National Conference on Chemistry Solutions at SRM University, India RESEARCH ARTICLE