Fabrication of ZnO Nanocap-Ordered Arrays with Controllable Amount of Au Nanoparticles Decorated and Their Detection and Degradation Performance for Harmful Molecules

Peng Zhang; Guangqiang Liu; Wangsheng Xu; Luping Meng; Xing Wang; Liang Shang; Ying Xiong; Qingping Luo; Sujuan Feng

doi:10.1021/acsomega.0c04363

Fabrication of ZnO Nanocap-Ordered Arrays with Controllable Amount of Au Nanoparticles Decorated and Their Detection and Degradation Performance for Harmful Molecules

ACS Omega. 2020 Dec 2;5(49):31730-31737. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.0c04363. eCollection 2020 Dec 15.

Authors

Peng Zhang¹, Guangqiang Liu¹, Wangsheng Xu², Luping Meng¹, Xing Wang¹, Liang Shang¹, Ying Xiong³, Qingping Luo³, Sujuan Feng¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Physics and Physical Engineering, Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Laser Polarization and Information Technology, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, P. R. China.
² Key Laboratory of Materials Physics, Anhui Key Laboratory of Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology, Institute of Solid State Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, P. R. China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Environment-friendly Energy Materials, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang 621010, P. R. China.

Abstract

This paper mainly presents a facile and cost-effective method to achieve large-scale ZnO nanocap (ZnO NC)-ordered arrays with a controllable amount of Au nanoparticles (Au NPs) decorated on their surface. The preparation process includes the construction of polystyrene nanosphere (PS) mask, metal deposition, and annealing process. The Au NPs/ZnO NCs have apparent hierarchical structure. Interestingly, the size and number of Au NPs can be controlled by changing the time of Au deposition and the diameter of PSs. Moreover, the Au NP/ZnO NC arrays can be used as a substrate to detect harmful dye molecules based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effect, and show ultrahigh sensitivity with a limit of detection (LoD) of 10^-10 M for crystal violet (CV) molecules. In addition, the above substrate has achieved reusable detection due to their excellent photocatalytic degradation performance for harmful molecules. The finite difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation results have revealed that SERS "hot spots" are almost distributed at the junctions of Au NPs and ZnO NCs. The above results show that the composite substrates have a good prospect in practical applications in the future.