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Published on: March 20, 2015
Ligand-Free Fabrication of Ag Nanoassemblies for Highly Sensitive and Reproducible Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering
Kai-Xuan Xu1, Xing Chen2, Zongxiong Huang3
1Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Analytical Science of Food Safety and Biology, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Analysis and Detection Technology for Food Safety, College of Chemistry, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350108, China.
Abstract:
The assemblies of plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) are the universal methods for enhancing their surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) activities. However, the present methods suffer from the problems of poor reproducibility, complicated fabrication, or the adsorption of ligands on the surface, which limit their practical applications. In this work, by using a facile freeze-thaw method, we are able to fabricate the assemblies of Ag NPs with highly reproducible SERS activity without the use of ligands. Moreover, the Ag NPs can be well kept in a frozen state for a long time with few influences on the reproducibility (relative standard deviation, RSD ca. 7%), while those kept in colloid (4 °C) suffer from gradual surface oxidation and aggregation. Such a simple freeze-thaw method does not require the introduction of any ligands (or linkers) with long-term stability and reproducibility, implying its wide applications in practical SERS sensing.
