Star-shaped plasmonic nanostructures: New, simply synthetized materials for Raman analysis of surfaces

In this contribution we show that star-shaped gold nanoparticles and star-shaped nanostructures containing a gold core (Au@SiO₂, Au@Ag, and Au@Ag@SiO₂) can be used as very efficient, easy to produce and reproducible electromagnetic nanoresonators for the Raman analysis of surfaces, especially for shell-isolated nanoparticle-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SHINERS) measurements. The "one pot" procedure used in this work for synthesizing star-shaped gold nanoparticles (a reduction of chloroauric anions by hydrogen peroxide in an alkaline solution) is one of the simplest procedures for synthesizing highly anisotropic plasmonic nanostructures containing many sharp apexes and edges. There is no need to purify the obtained samples of gold nanostars - under these conditions, the formation of nanoparticles having other shapes and significantly different sizes is neglected. Moreover, there is no need to purify the nanoparticles obtained from any surfactant, whereas such purification is usually required when other anisotropic gold nanoparticles are synthetized. We found that the gold nanostars obtained are about one order of magnitude more efficient as nanoresonators for carrying out Raman analysis of a model surface than the equivalent standard spherical nanostructures. We also studied the effect of the silica layer on the stability of Au@Ag star-shaped nanoparticles in contact with yeast cells.