Neodymium doped zinc oxide for ultersensitive SERS substrate

We report on the fabrication of neodymium doped zinc oxide (ZNO) for use in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The SERS enhancement of ZNO nanoparticles exhibited 7 times higher than that of pure zinc oxide. We analyzed in detail the enhancement mechanism of the ZNO. The detection limit of malachite green (MG) was 10(-7) M, and the SERS signal intensity showed a good linear relationship with the logarithm of the MG concentration (R-2 = 0.9817). This indicates that ZNO is an excellent SERS substrate for trace analysis and ultrasensitive molecular sensing. This study provides a new strategy to improve the overall SERS property of ZnO-based materials via chemical doping.