Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has advanced over the last four decades and has become an attractive tool for highly sensitive analysis in fields such as medicine and environmental monitoring. Recently, there has been an urgent demand for reusable and long-lived SERS substrates as a means of reducing the costs associated with this technique To this end, we fabricated a SERS substrate comprising a silicon nanowire array coated with silver nanoparticles, using metal-assisted chemical etching followed by photonic reduction. The morphology and growth mechanism of the SERS substrate were carefully examined and the performance of the fabricated SERS substrate was tested using rhodamine 6G and dopamine hydrochloride. The data show that this new substrate provides an enhancement factor of nearly 1 × 108. This work demonstrates that a silicon nanowire array coated with silver nanoparticles is sensitive and sufficiently robust to allow repeated reuse. These results suggest that this newly developed technique could allow SERS to be used in many commercial applications.
Keywords: SERS; metal assisted chemical etching; nanostructure; photonic reduction; reusability.