Construction of Ag spherical micro/nanostructures as SERS-active substrates

Abstract

The silver spherical micro/nanostructures were fabricated by the electrochemical deposition technique. Many silver nanosheets build the spherical microstructures. Confirmed by XRD, UV-VIS and SEM characterization measures, the Ag spherical micro/nanostructures were synthesized on the ITO conductive substrates. Furthermore, different current densities were selected to investigate the growth of Ag microspheres. As the gaps between the nanosheets formatted the “hot spots”, which can effectively enhance the Raman signal, we chose the R6G molecule as the probe molecule to evaluate the SERS performance. The experiment results prove that the Ag spherical micro/nanostructures obtained by the simple electrochemical techniques can be used as high-performance SERS-active substrates.