3D Ultrasensitive Polymers-Plasmonic Hybrid Flexible Platform for In-Situ Detection

Abstract

This paper introduces a three-dimensional (3D) pyramid to the polymers-plasmonic hybrid structure of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) composite silver nanoparticle (AgNPs) as a higher quality flexible surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate. Benefiting from the effective oscillation of light inside the pyramid valley could provide wide distributions of 3D “hot spots” in a large space. The inclined surface design of the pyramid structure could facilitate the aggregation of probe molecules, which achieves highly sensitive detection of rhodamine 6G (R6G) and crystal violet (CV). In addition, the AgNPs and PMMA composite structures provide uniform space distribution for analyte detection in a designated hot spot zone. The incident light can penetrate the external PMMA film to trigger the localized plasmon resonance of the encapsulated AgNPs, achieving enormous enhancement factor (~ 6.24 × 10 8 ). After undergoes mechanical deformation, the flexible SERS substrate still maintains high mechanical stability, which was proved by experiment and theory. For practical applications, the prepared flexible SERS substrate is adapted to the in-situ Raman detection of adenosine aqueous solution and the methylene-blue (MB) molecule detection of the skin of a fish, providing a direct and nondestructive active-platform for the detecting on the surfaces with any arbitrary morphology and aqueous solution.

Detection of Silver Nanoparticles in Seawater Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering

“…Taking advantage of the high scattering and plasmonic properties of AgNPs [ 16 , 17 ], specific detection methods based on surface-enhance Raman scattering can be developed. Unlike Raman spectroscopy, SERS overcomes the limitation due to weak signals by exploiting such AgNPs properties via electromagnetic enhancement mechanism to Raman signal increase [ 18 ].…”

Melamine Foams Decorated with In-Situ Synthesized Gold and Palladium Nanoparticles

“…These NPs present not only a high surface to volume ratio but also different properties than bulk materials, such as surface plasmon resonance, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, variations in the band gap, while keeping high stability [1][2][3][4]. Therefore, noble metal NPs have proved to be suitable materials for biomedical [1,6,10,11], sensoring [3,8,[12][13][14], optoelectronics [15,16], water remediation [5,[17][18][19], catalysis [7,[20][21][22], and food control applications [4].…”

Non-Invasive Approaches for the Evaluation of the Functionalization of Melamine Foams with In-Situ Synthesized Silver Nanoparticles

“…Finally, it is fundamental to select a filler able to provide the desired functionality and compatible with both the polymer matrix and production route. A broad range of nanofillers can be found in the literature, including clays, [2,[18][19][20] organic compounds, [11] graphene, [5,8,12], and inorganic nanoparticles (e.g., metal nanoparticles) [1,4,6,21]. In particular, noble metal nanoparticles are of great interest for their remarkable physical properties [16] such as their stability, large surface area, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, [21] surface plasmon resonance [15,21], and high interfacial reactivity [16,[22][23][24][25].…”

“…A broad range of nanofillers can be found in the literature, including clays, [2,[18][19][20] organic compounds, [11] graphene, [5,8,12], and inorganic nanoparticles (e.g., metal nanoparticles) [1,4,6,21]. In particular, noble metal nanoparticles are of great interest for their remarkable physical properties [16] such as their stability, large surface area, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, [21] surface plasmon resonance [15,21], and high interfacial reactivity [16,[22][23][24][25]. Accordingly, these nanoparticles can be employed in diverse applications such as water treatment [1,6,24,26], sensoring [12,21,27], catalysis [12,28], biomedical [22,25,29], or optoelectronics [15,30].…”

“…They usually require complex sample preparation (time-consuming), and in terms of the nanoparticles load determination, provide only qualitative information or quantitative elemental information limited to the surface of the nanocomposite [2]. On the contrary, non-invasive techniques commonly employed on the characterization of nanocomposites, such as Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR), ultra-violet visible UV-vis, and Raman spectroscopies, are also employed to identify the presence of the nanoparticles, but present limitations to quantify their amount [21,31,33]. In addition, there are less conventional non-invasive techniques which can be employed on nanocomposites, such as colorimetry [31][32][33][34][35] and x-ray radiography, [9,[36][37][38] which has not been previously tested with this aim.…”