Controlled synthesis of homogeneous Ag nanosheet-assembled film for effective SERS substrate

Homogeneous Ag nanosheet-assembled film was successfully fabricated by using Cu plate through a simple modified solution method, where weak reductive Cu2O layer and complexing agent citrate ions were both introduced into the reaction system to control the reaction process. Meanwhile, citrate ions were used as morphology-controlled reagent to lead Ag units to grow in the form of nanosheet. The growth process exhibited that Ag nanosheet-assembled film formed slowly with reaction proceeding. Additionally, the pack density of nanosheets in the final product was found to be adjusted by the concentrations of Ag(+) ions in precursor solution. Using Rhodamine 6G (R6G) as probing molecules, the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) experiments showed that the Ag film assembled by nanosheets with high pack density exhibited excellent detecting performance, which could be used as effective SERS substrate for ultrasensitive detecting. Besides, a novel quintuplet SERS substrate could be synthesized in one batch by our method, which showed good reproducibility and a linear dependence between analyte concentrations and intensities, revealing the advantage of this method for easily scale-up production.