Noble metal-comparable SERS enhancement from semiconducting metal oxides by making oxygen vacancies
By Shan Cong, Yinyin Yuan, Zhigang Chen, Junyu Hou, Mei Yang, Yanli Su, Yongyi Zhang, Liang Li, Qingwen Li, Fengxia Geng and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2015
647 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) represents a very powerful tool for the identification of molecular species, but unfortunately it has been essentially restricted to noble metal supports (Au, Ag and Cu). While the application of semiconductor materials as SERS substrate would enormously widen the range of uses for this technique, the detection sensitivity has been much inferior and the achievable SERS enhancement was rather limited, thereby greatly limiting the practical applications. Here we report the employment of non-stoichiometric tungsten oxide nanostructure, sea urchin-like W18O49 nanowire, as the substrate material, to magnify the substrate–analyte molecule interaction, leading to significant magnifications in Raman spectroscopic signature. The enrichment of surface oxygen vacancy could bring additional enhancements. The detection limit concentration was as low as 10−7 M and the maximum enhancement factor was 3.4 × 105, in the rank of the highest sensitivity, to our best knowledge, among semiconducting materials, even comparable to noble metals without ‘hot spots’. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy is widely used for rapid and sensitive molecular detection in chemistry and biology, but typically relies on noble metals. Here the authors report a non-stoichiometric semiconducting material with defect-rich surface that displays excellent detection limits and enhancement factors.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b05ae893197dfd48a0cf0521ee162b83a1714fc8
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Citations in the corpus
- Plasmonic doped semiconductor nanocrystals: Properties, fabrication, applications and perspectives (2017, background): “The authors assigned the Raman enhancement to the formation of a charge-transfer state between the adsorbate and the semiconductor substrate, strongly involving the vacancy states within the bandgap of tungsten oxide.[258] Similarly CuTe nanorods with a very weak plasmonic peak did not yield any SER”