Graphene oxide-highly anisotropic noble metal hybrid systems for intensified surface enhanced Raman scattering and direct capture and sensitive discrimination in PCBs monitoring

Cong-Yun Zhang; Bai-Chuan Zhao; Rui Hao; Zhi Wang; Yao-Wu Hao; Bin Zhao; Ya-Qing Liu

doi:10.1016/j.jhazmat.2019.121510

Graphene oxide-highly anisotropic noble metal hybrid systems for intensified surface enhanced Raman scattering and direct capture and sensitive discrimination in PCBs monitoring

J Hazard Mater. 2020 Mar 5:385:121510. doi: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2019.121510. Epub 2019 Oct 24.

Authors

Cong-Yun Zhang¹, Bai-Chuan Zhao¹, Rui Hao¹, Zhi Wang¹, Yao-Wu Hao², Bin Zhao³, Ya-Qing Liu⁴

Affiliations

¹ Shanxi Province Key Laboratory of Functional Nanocomposites, School of Materials Science and Engineering, North University of China, Taiyuan 030051, China.
² The Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019, USA.
³ Shanxi Province Key Laboratory of Functional Nanocomposites, School of Materials Science and Engineering, North University of China, Taiyuan 030051, China. Electronic address: z.bin88@gmail.com.
⁴ Shanxi Province Key Laboratory of Functional Nanocomposites, School of Materials Science and Engineering, North University of China, Taiyuan 030051, China. Electronic address: lyq@nuc.edu.cn.

PMID: 31704120
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2019.121510

Abstract

Graphene oxide (GO)-anisotropic noble metal hybrid systems were developed as highly sensitive and reproducible surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) platform, in which ultrathin GO was embedded between two metallic layers of flower-like Ag nanoparticles (AgNFs) and gold nanostars (AuNSts). Due to multi-dimensional plasmonic coupling effect, the well-designed AgNFs-GO-AuNSts sandwich structures possessed ultrahigh sensitivity with the detection limit of R6G as low as 1.0 × 10^-13 M and high enhancement factor of 2.59 × 10⁷. Additionally, the GO interlayer could function as protective shell to suppress the oxidation of bottom silver layer and efficiently position the target analytes within hot spots. These features endow the substrate with high stability and excellent reproducibility (Signal variations < 7%). Particularly, the GO sandwiched substrate can be explored for the direct capture and sensitive detection of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) without any organic modifier as molecule harvester. This minimum detected concentration was estimated as low as 3.4 × 10^-6 M. The detection method based on GO mediated sandwich substrate avoids complicated surface modification manipulations and improves the substrate cleanness. Moreover, the resultant sandwich substrates can be used to recognize fingerprint peaks of different PCBs in their complex mixture, revealing great potential applications in SERS-based simultaneous detection of multiple pollutants with low affinity.

Keywords: Graphene oxide; Multi-dimensional plasmonic coupling; Polychlorinated biphenyls; SERS.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't