Freestanding and Permeable Nanoporous Gold Membranes for Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) demands reliable, high-enhancement substrates in order to be used in different fields of application. Here we introduce freestanding porous gold membranes (PAuM) as easy-to-produce, scalable, mechanically stable, and effective SERS substrates. We fabricate large-scale sub-30 nm thick PAuM that form freestanding membranes with varying morphologies depending on the nominal gold thickness. These PAuM are mechanically stable for pressures up to more than 3 bar and exhibit surface-enhanced Raman scattering with local enhancement factors from 10⁴ to 10⁵, which we demonstrate by wavelength-dependent and spatially resolved Raman measurements using graphene as a local Raman probe. Numerical simulations reveal that the enhancement arises from individual, nanoscale pores in the membrane acting as optical slot antennas. Our PAuM are mechanically stable, provide robust SERS enhancement for excitation power densities up to 10⁶ W cm^-2, and may find use as a building block in SERS-based sensing applications.