Droplet-Confined Electroless Deposition of Silver Nanoparticles on Ordered Superhydrophobic Structures for High Uniform SERS Measurements

Daren Xu; Fei Teng; Zhongshun Wang; Nan Lu

doi:10.1021/acsami.7b04240

Droplet-Confined Electroless Deposition of Silver Nanoparticles on Ordered Superhydrophobic Structures for High Uniform SERS Measurements

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2017 Jun 28;9(25):21548-21553. doi: 10.1021/acsami.7b04240. Epub 2017 Jun 15.

Authors

Daren Xu¹, Fei Teng¹, Zhongshun Wang¹, Nan Lu¹

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, College of Chemistry, Jilin University , Changchun 130012, P. R. China.

PMID: 28580781
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b04240

Abstract

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectroscopy (SERS) is a nondestructive testing technique. To increase reproducibility of the SERS measurement is the key issue for improving the performance of SERS. In this article, we demonstrate an efficient method to improve the reproducibility, using confined silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) as a substrate. The AgNPs are formed uniformly on the tops of the prepared nanopillars by droplet-confined electroless deposition on the hydrophobic Si nanopillar arrays. The AgNPs present an excellent reproducibility in Raman measurement; the relative standard deviation is down to 3.40%. There exists a great linear correlation between the concentration of Rhodamine 6G (R6G) and the Raman intensity in the log-log plot; R² is 0.998, indicating that this SERS substrate can be applied for the quantitative SERS analysis. Meanwhile, the minimum detection concentration is down to 10^-11 M on the hydrophobic substrate, with R6G as a probe molecule.

Keywords: AgNPs; SERS; droplet-confined electroless deposition; ordered superhydrophobic structures; reproducibility.