Synthesis of SERS-Active Stable Anisotropic Silver Nanostructures Constituted by Self-Assembly of Multiple Silver Nanopetals

Abstract

We have synthesized anisotropic flower-like sliver nanostructures with multiple silver nanopetal-like structures, which are found to be protruding from the core body, in large scale, using single step galvanic reaction of ferrocene (FeCp2) with silver nitrate in presence of poly(vinyl pyrrolidone). The non-uniformly distributed multiple petal-like structures are found to be self-assembled by stacking layer by layer to form the anisotropic flower-like silver nanostructures. These anisotropic silver nanostructures constitute an active substrate material for surface-enhanced Raman scattering, which was confirmed from representative experiments using Rhodamine 6G and melamine (2,4,6-triamino-1,3,5-triazine) as probe molecules. Moreover, the stability of the synthesized AgNS has also been investigated. The results suggested that these AgNS exhibited excellent stability even after 1 month of storage and even after 3 months they show surface-enhanced Raman scattering effect. Therefore, our study exhibits highly stable silver nanostructures with unique optical properties. We believe this synthetic route for the formation of self-assembled anisotropic silver nanostructures can be a general synthetic platform to fabricate metal nanostructures with complex morphologies.