Drift study of hematite adhered onto silver and mercury

Diffuse reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (DRIFT) has been used as a tool to study colloidal hematite adhered onto silver and mercury electrodes from suspensions using sodium perchlorate as electrolyte. The results show a shift of one lattice vibrational band toward higher energies when hematite particles are attached onto the metal surface, the shift being more important for mercury. Also the band width increases upon attachment, which can be explained by particle aggregation on the surface. The band shift can be attributed to specific interactions between the colloidal particles and the metal surface. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.