Abstract
The pyro-electrohydrodynamic jet (p-jet) printing technology has been used for the fabrication of confined assemblies of gold nanoparticles with a round shape and a diameter ranging between 100 and 200 μm. The surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) performance of the p-jet substrate was evaluated by using Rhodamine 6G (R6G) as a reference. The results demonstrate that this kind of SERS substrate exhibits strong plasmonic effects and a significant reproducibility of the signal with a coefficient of variation below 15%. We tested the signal behavior also in case of the bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a model analyte, to demonstrate the affinity with biomolecules. Strong SERS activity was measured also for BSA across the whole spot area. The spectral patterns collected in different locations of the sensing area were highly reproducible. This observation was substantiated by multivariate analysis of the imaging datasets and opens the route towards a potential application of this kind of SERS substrate in biosensing.
Highlights
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a versatile analytical technique widely used for molecular detection and for the investigation of a great variety of chemical and biological samples (Aroca, 2006; Le Ru and Etchegoin, 2008)
The basic principle of the p-jet printing is based on the pyroelectric effect and, on the use of ferroelectric crystals (LN) and the manipulation of the liquid samples in the presence of an electric field generated pyroelectrically
A standard XYZ micrometric manual translation stage is used for aligning the orifice with the central point of a piece of lithium niobate (LN) crystal, while a heating element made of tungsten wire is placed in contact with the crystal, and an electric field induced by the pyroelectric effect exerts an attractive force on the dropmeniscus deforming and generating liquid jet emission
Summary
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a versatile analytical technique widely used for molecular detection and for the investigation of a great variety of chemical and biological samples (Aroca, 2006; Le Ru and Etchegoin, 2008). The effect is due to the inhomogeneous distribution of the nanoparticles across the sensing surface, which generally results after drying. Attempts to alleviate this issue mostly involve the chemical modification (derivatization) of the substrate surface, but so far, limited success has been achieved (Wang and Kong, 2015; Fornasaro et al, 2020). Related to the non-uniform SERS activity of 2D sensors is the undersampling problem (Shin and Chung, 2013): in most experimental setups, spectral collection is made through a microscope objective, which irradiates (and collects signals from) an area of up to 200 μm in diameter.
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