In situ growth of monolayer porous gold nanoparticles film as high-performance SERS substrates

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has recently received considerable attention as an ultrasensitive analytic technique. However, its wide application is limited by lack of excellent SERS-active substrates. In this work a SERS substrate with arrayed monolayer films of porous gold nanoparticles is prepared on a solid substrate by a facile, in situ and one-step growth approach. Specifically, the solid substrate was coated with a layer of dense positive charges first by layer-by-layer assembly, followed by patterned a PDMS film with arrayed wells on the substrate. Then the growth solution including chlorauric acid, cetyltrimethylammonium chloride, and ascorbic acid in a certain proportion was transferred into the wells for in situ and one-step growth of porous gold nanoparticles on the substrate. The growth time, feed ratio of the reagents, and repeat times of the in situ growth were studied systematically to obtain optimal parameters for preparing an optimal SERS substrate. The as-prepared optimal SERS substrate not only has good SERS performance with the enhancement factor up to ∼1.10 × 106, but also shows good uniformity and stability. The SERS substrate was further utilized to be ultrasensitive SERS-based chemical sensors for ppb-level detection of highly toxic dyfonate. The preliminary result indicates that the as-prepared SERS substrate has good SERS performance and shows a number of great potential applications in SERS-based sensors.