Design and construction of a sensitive silver substrate for surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectroscopy

A well-designed and new type of sensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-active substrate is reported in the paper. The process, which is performed by using 5 angstrom molecular sieves as templates and final removal of the templates, has considerable virtue of enormously enlarging the amount of contact spots between every pair of particles due to the formation of inner planar nanostructures. First, the ammine complexes of silver ions appear to adsorb on the molecular sieves, then reduced and coalescenced to form closed silver layers, and the 5 angstrom molecular sieves are subsequently removed by using HF to produce nanostructure aggregations. it has the prominent advantages that the SERS peak intensity of the similar to 1076 cm(-1) band of 4-mercaptophenol (4-MPH) adsorbed on Ag nanoaggreates is about 60 and 30 times greater than when it is adsorbed on silver narroparticles coated on a glass substrate or on commercially available 2 mu m-sizecl silver (mu Ag) powders, respectively. The new SERS-active substrate is produced simply and cost-effectively, so it is expected to play a great role in the development of SERS-based analytical devices. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.