Hydrothermal Fabrication of Efficient Binary Pd/Ag2S Heterojunction Composites: Synthesis, Characterization, and Fluorometric Selective Sensing of Organophosphate Pesticides.

Abstract

Although many plasmonic nanosensors have been established for the detection of analytes, few of them are feasible for analyzing natural samples with very complex matrices because of insufficient method selectivity. To address this challenge, we propose an epitaxial and lattice-mismatch approach to the synthesis of a unique Pd/Ag2S nanostructure, which consists of a Pd segment with excellent plasmonic characteristics, and a highly stable Ag2S portion with minimum solubility product (Ksp(Ag2S) = 6.3 × 10- 50). Hence, Ag2S nanoparticles (NPs) and optimized (10.05 mmol/L) Pd/Ag2S composite were prepared using a hydrothermal method. The fabricated samples were characterized using different tools including UV-vis DRS, PL, powder XRD, TEM, and BET surface area measurements. Furthermore, the fluorometric sensing performance of the Ag2S and Pd/Ag2S samples was examined in the detection of organophosphate pesticides such as MLT, PRT, DZN, FNT, DCL, MCP, and CPS pesticides at room temperature. The quantitative detection of MLT, PRT, DZN, FNT, DCL, MCP, and CPS pesticides was achieved based on the Pd/Ag2S composite and organophosphate group-specific interaction. The optimized sensor exhibited a lower limit of detection (3.08 µM), excellent reproducibility, selectivity, and stability with an enhanced sensitivity of - 207.1 µA/µM cm2 (R2 = 0.98) in the range of 10 µM-100 µM for the detection of CPS pesticide. In addition, the fluorometric sensor has excellent selectivity, reproducibility, and stability, providing a feasible method for not only the detection of CPS pesticides but also other analytes in the future.