Preparation of CuO/Ag rough nanostructures as SERS-active substrates

Abstract

In this paper, CuO nanostructures with nanometer roughness were firstly prepared by electrochemical anodic oxidation method, and then CuO/Ag composite nanostructures were prepared by magnetron sputtering method on the surface of CuO substrate. The successful deposition of Ag films on CuO was confirmed by XRD, UV-Vis and SEM. In addition, the effects of different Ag sputtering time on substrate morphology and SERS properties were studied. Due to the many gaps between the rough CuO/Ag nanomorphology, the substrate has many “hot spots” and adsorption sites, which can effectively improve the SERS performance of the substrate. We selected R6G dye molecule as the probe molecule to evaluate the SERS performance of the substrate. The final experimental results show that the preparation method of CuO/Ag rough nanostructure is simple, and it has significant SERS performance improvement. The substrate’s detection limit for R6G can even reach 10-11M.