Highly Sensitive, Uniform, and Reproducible Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Substrate with Nanometer-Scale Quasi-periodic Nanostructures

Abstract

We introduce a simple and cost-effective approach for fabrication of effective surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates. It is shown that the as-fabricated substrates show excellent SERS effects in various probe molecules with high sensitivity, that is, picomolar level detection, and also good reliability. With a SERS enhancement factor beyond 10 and excellent reproducibility (deviation less than 5%) of signal intensity, the fabrication of the SERS substrate is realized on a four-inch wafer and proven to be effective in pesticide residue detection. The SERS substrate is realized first through the fabrication of quasi-periodic nanostructured silicon with dimension features in tens of nanometers using superaligned carbon nanotubes networks as an etching mask, after which a large amount of hot spots with nanometer gaps are formed through deposition of a gold film. With rigorous nanostructure design, the enhanced performance of electromagnetic field distribution for nanostructures is optimized. With the advantage of cost-effective large-area preparation, it is believed that the as-fabricated SERS substrate could be used in a wide variety of actual applications where detection of trace amounts is necessary.

Surface‐enhanced Raman scattering studies of gold‐coated ripple‐like nanostructures on iron substrate achieved by femtosecond laser irradiation in water

“…Further detailed experiments are needed to highlight the contribution of periodicity on the SERS enhancements. The existing literature has demonstrated that the periodic structures‐based sensors achieved from various chemical approaches acted as efficient SERS platforms regarding sensitivity, selectivity, and signal uniformity . Herein, Au‐coated ripple structures have shown the superior EFs to some of earlier published results, and the fabricated methodology in the present study is simple, viable, and could be cost‐effective when compared with the chemical approaches.…”

Development of highly reliable SERS‐active photonic crystal fiber probe and its application in the detection of ovarian cancer biomarker in cyst fluid

“…All measured spectra were repeatable with minimum variation in intensity and relative standard deviation (RSD) was found to be ~1.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reproducibility in SERS sensing, where signal variations between 5% and 10% are common among the best ever conventional substrates . Detection of biochemicals in the form of liquid and gas (specifically volatile organic compounds) has great relevance in biomedical, chemical, homeland security and environmental monitoring applications and demands very high sensitivity to meet the practically relevant end use applications.…”

Fabrication and Applications of 3D Nanoarchitectures for Advanced Electrocatalysts and Sensors

“…One of the biggest challenges is uniform distribution of hot spots throughout the array of nanostructures for reproducible SERS spectra. [57,[64][65][66] Moreover, although SERS nanostructures are usually arranged in two dimensions, a different design of plasmonic nanostructures should be developed to incorporate more hot spots on a given substrate area.…”