Abstract
Metallic nanogaps have great values in plasmonics devices. However, large-area and low-cost fabrication of such nanogaps is still a huge obstacle, hindering their practical use. In this work, inspired by the cracking behavior of the tomato skin, a water-swelling-driven fabrication method is developed. An Au thinfilm is deposited on a super absorbent polymer (SAP) layer. Once the SAP layer absorbs water and swells, gaps will be created on the surface of the Au thinfilm at a centimeter-scale. Further experimentation indicates that such Au gaps can enhance the Raman scattering signal. In principle, the water-swelling-driven fabrication route can also create gaps on other metallic film and even nonmetallic film in a low-cost way.
Highlights
Metallic gaps with tens of nanometers or several nanometers in size possess unique physical and chemical properties, which have attracted enormous attention in plasmonics devices [1,2,3,4,5], transistors [6,7,8,9] and molecular electronics [10,11]
The metallic nanogap can generate surface plasma resonance that will strongly enhance the localized electromagnetic field. This effect has great prospects in SERS [12,13,14,15] and sensing [16,17,18]. In these application scenarios, fabricating large-area metallic nanogaps in a low-cost manner is of great importance
Surface morphologies were characterized with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) (ZEISS sigma 300, Jena, Germany) operated at 5 kV
Summary
Metallic gaps with tens of nanometers or several nanometers in size possess unique physical and chemical properties, which have attracted enormous attention in plasmonics devices [1,2,3,4,5], transistors [6,7,8,9] and molecular electronics [10,11]. The metallic nanogap can generate surface plasma resonance that will strongly enhance the localized electromagnetic field. This effect has great prospects in SERS (surface enhanced Raman scattering) [12,13,14,15] and sensing [16,17,18]. In these application scenarios, fabricating large-area metallic nanogaps in a low-cost manner is of great importance. Resist-based lithography such as high-resolution EBL (electron beam lithography) is able to directly fabricate arrays of nanosized gaps [19,20,21]
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