Electrodeposition of Ag nanodendrites SERS substrates for detection of malachite green

In this paper, novel Ag nanodendrites (Ag NDs) substrates were designed and fabricated on indium tin oxide (ITO) glass by using cyclic voltammetry electrodeposition. This method was simple, facile and controllable without any seed, template or surfactant. The influence of electrodeposition conditions on the microstructure and SERS-active of Ag NDs substrate were studied. Under the optimized conditions, the as-prepared Ag NDs exhibited superior SERS activity toward malachite green(MG) with high enhancement effect of 5.4 × 10 9 and low detection limit of 9.4 × 10 −13  M. Moreover, the Ag-NDs substrate shows extremely good uniformity and reproducibility with low relative standard deviation of 12.6% for substrate-to-substrate. In addition, a logarithmic correlation between MG concentration and Raman intensity was obtained, with the linearly dependent coefficient (R 2 ) of 0.984. The as-prepared Ag NDs substrates were successfully applied to the determination of MG in environmental water, with recoveries in the range of 87.8% to 109.6%. These results show high potential of the Ag NDs as effective SERS substrates for rapid detection of other trace-level contaminants in environment water.