3 years ago
Properly Structured, Any Metal Can Produce Intense Surface Enhanced Raman Spectra

Philip P. F. Chidester, Galen D. Stucky, Martin Moskovits, Katherine N. Kanipe, Carl D. Meinhart
While silver and gold have been the dominant plasmonic metals used for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) since the field’s inception. We argue that virtually any metal, when appropriately nanostructured as a grating, has the potential to be an efficient SERS substrate. This conclusion provides the basis for making SERS a general tool for studying surface processes and catalysis and allows SERS substrates to be routinely based on earth-abundant, low-cost, and chemically interesting metals. We illustrate the above premise by producing highly performing SERS substrates using aluminum, nickel, and copper in addition to silver and gold as benchmarks. All five metals were found to yield high SERS intensities. The approximately three orders enhancement variation among the five substrates based on differing metals is ascribed mainly to local field effects associated with individual grating elements. This conclusion is supported by local field calculations. This suggests that the largest contribution to the enhancement is a (radiative) nonlocal grating-based (plasmonic) effect which is approximately equal for all of the gratings we studied regardless of metal from which they were fabricated, so long as the structural details of the gratings were kept constant.
Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b02637
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b02637
You might also like
Never Miss Important Research
Researcher is an app designed by academics, for academics. Create a personalised feed in two minutes.
Choose from over 15,000 academics journals covering ten research areas then let Researcher deliver you papers tailored to your interests each day.
Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.