Fabrication of Plasmonic Supercrystals and Their SERS Enhancing Properties

Supercrystals, made of ordered plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) in close contact, turn out as efficient SERS substrates. However, the production of highly homogeneous structures implies precise control over a multitude of parameters including quality of the building blocks, solvent evaporation rate, and surface chemistry interactions. To pursue this goal, different approaches using templates to self-assembly NPs have been developed in recent years. Here, we review the most common procedures employing two different substrates, planar and patterned templates. Several approaches and strategies are described showing the optical properties of the resulted supercrystals and their behavior as SERS substrates.