Abstract
Silver nanostructured films suitable for use as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates are prepared in just 2 hours by the solid-state ionics method. By changing the intensity of the external direct current, we can readily control the surface morphology and growth rate of the silver nanostructured films. A detailed investigation of the surface enhancement of the silver nanostructured films using Rhodamine 6G (R6G) as a molecular probe revealed that the enhancement factor of the films was up to 1011. We used the silver nanostructured films as substrates in SERS detection of human red blood cells (RBCs). The SERS spectra of RBCs on the silver nanostructured film could be clearly detected at a laser power of just 0.05 mW. Comparison of the SERS spectra of RBCs obtained from younger and older donors showed that the SERS spectra depended on donor age. A greater proportion of the haemoglobin in the RBCs of older donors was in the deoxygenated state than that of the younger donors. This implies that haemoglobin of older people has lower oxygen-carrying capacity than that of younger people. Overall, the fabricated silver substrates show promise in biomedical SERS spectral detection.
Highlights
Considerable theoretical and experimental research has shown that surface plasmon resonance readily occurs on the surface of noble metal nanostructures excited by incident photons and results in marked local field enhancement[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We focus on the surface morphology and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) properties of silver nanostructures grown with an external direct current of tens of microamps and explore the ability of the solid-state ionics method to quickly grow controlled silver nanostructures that are promising for biomedical detection
The surface enhancement ability of silver nanostructures grown at different external direct current
Summary
Considerable theoretical and experimental research has shown that surface plasmon resonance readily occurs on the surface of noble metal nanostructures excited by incident photons and results in marked local field enhancement[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The solid-state ionics method improved by our research group has the advantages of convenience and controllability[17,18] This method does not use templates so template removal or sample purification is not required and silver nanostructures are grown in the solid phase and can conveniently be directly picked up by tweezers. This method originally took weeks to grow centimetre-scale nanomaterials because the external direct current was only [3,4,5,6,7,8] μA17–20.
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