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Fast and eco-friendly fabrication of uniform Ag substrates for highly sensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering

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Abstract

This study proposed a fast, simple, eco-friendly method for obtaining highly sensitive and uniform surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of silver (Ag) nanotextured substrates decorated with silver nanoparticles in open air. By splitting conventional femtosecond pulses (subpulse delay Δt = 0 ps) into pulse trains (subpulse delay Δt = 3 ps), the mean diameter of Ag nanoparticles was reduced by almost half and the amount of Ag nanoparticles with a diameter ranging from 20 to 60 nm was increased by more than 11 times. The substrate fabricated by femtosecond pulse trains has four main merits as follows: (1) High sensitivity: the maximum SERS enhancement factor is 1.26 × 109; (2) High efficiency: the fabrication rate can be up to 1600 μm2/s, which is 20–40 times faster than femtosecond photochemical reduction; (3) Good reproducibility: the relative standard deviation of the Raman signal intensity is 10.7%, which is one-third of that for conventional femtosecond laser; (4) Eco-friendly fabrication: neither chemical reagents nor vacuum conditions are needed during the fabrication process.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the 863 of Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. 2015AA042702), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 91323301) and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (Grant No. NCET-13-0039). We thank Prof. Zheyu Fang and Dr. Shuai Zu of Peking University for the dark-field spectra experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laser Micro/Nano-Fabrication Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Yongda Xu, Xin Li, Lan Jiang, Ge Meng & Peng Ran

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0511, US

    Yongfeng Lu

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  1. Yongda Xu
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  2. Xin Li
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  3. Lan Jiang
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  4. Ge Meng
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  5. Peng Ran
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Correspondence to Xin Li.

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Xu, Y., Li, X., Jiang, L. et al. Fast and eco-friendly fabrication of uniform Ag substrates for highly sensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering. Appl. Phys. A 123, 322 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-017-0937-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-017-0937-y

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