Highly porous bimetallic nanowires manufactured via a simple galvanic reaction have demonstrated superior activity in surface-enhanced Raman scattering, allowing ultrasensitive chemical detections on isolated porous nanowires in comparison to pristine silver nanowires.

The morphology, composition, and structure of semiconductor nanomaterials play important roles in tuning their unique physical and chemical properties for a variety of applications. We report a facile chemical method to etch cuprous oxide microcrystals which resulted in excellent performance in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Microscopic and spectroscopic tools were utilized to investigate the cuprous oxide structures with the chemical etching, as well as the assessment of the SERS sensitivity. The increasing SERS sensitivity can be attributed to the generation of Raman hot spots related to the etching-induced rough surface, sharp tips and edges, as well as the strong chemical interactions between the probe molecules and the SERS substrates. Our work introduced a simple method to modify the semiconductor nanomaterials and induce SERS activity, thus expanding the application area of cuprous oxide microcrystals.

An intriguing formation of nanoscale buckles is discovered when an array of aligned silver nanowires was deposited onto prestrained polydimethylsiloxane substrates. The spacing distance between the resulting silver nanoparticles corresponds to the buckling wavelength of the silver nanowires. The buckled nanowires exhibit unique optical properties, such as interruption of scattered polarized photons and emission of photons from subwavelength structure, as well as surface-enhanced Raman scattering at the vicinity of the formed nanobuckles. In this way, they have great potentials for nano-opto devices, catalysts for chemical reactions, and functional materials for chemical detections.

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