A simple and cost-effective strategy
was rationally designed to
fabricate a special sandwich structure consisting of graphene, bilayer
silver, and a copper plate, which was used as a surface-enhanced Raman
scattering (SERS) substrate for highly efficient SERS sensing and
detection of trace molecules. Silver dendrite (AgD) nanostructures
were subsequently grown on a silver nanosphere (AgNS)/Cu surface to
form a bilayer silver/Cu structure, which showed a 1.5-fold Raman
enhancement compared to that of the AgNS/Cu substrate. After depositing
graphene on the bilayer silver/Cu substrate to obtain a sandwich structure,
a higher SERS enhancement and better durability were enabled. The
SERS performances, measured by a portable Raman instrument, showed
that the optimized sandwich structure substrate exhibited high SERS
sensitivity to crystal violet (CV) and rhodamine 6G (R6G) with low
limit of detection of 10
–9
and 10
–8
M, respectively. Such a sandwich-structured substrate exhibited
good reproducibility across the entire detection areas with an average
relative standard deviation less than 5.9%, which permits its reliable
quantitative detection of CV and R6G molecules. In addition, graphene
both effectively improved the SERS performances and protected Ag nanocrystals
from oxidation, which endowed the sandwich structure a long-term stability
with deviation of characteristic peaks’ intensity lower than
3.6% after 25 days. This study indicates that the graphene/bilayer
silver/Cu sandwich structure as a SERS substrate has a great potential
in detecting environmental pollutants.