Tunable and highly reproducible surface-enhanced Raman scattering substrates made from large-scale nanoparticle arrays based on periodically poled LiNbO3 templates

Xiaoyan Liu; Kenji Kitamura; Qiuming Yu; Jiajie Xu; Minoru Osada; Nagata Takahiro; Jiangyu Li; Guozhong Cao

doi:10.1088/1468-6996/14/5/055011

Tunable and highly reproducible surface-enhanced Raman scattering substrates made from large-scale nanoparticle arrays based on periodically poled LiNbO₃ templates

Sci Technol Adv Mater. 2013 Oct 25;14(5):055011. doi: 10.1088/1468-6996/14/5/055011. eCollection 2013 Oct.

Authors

Xiaoyan Liu¹, Kenji Kitamura², Qiuming Yu³, Jiajie Xu³, Minoru Osada⁴, Nagata Takahiro⁴, Jiangyu Li⁵, Guozhong Cao⁶

Affiliations

¹ College of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering, Chongqing University of Science and Technology, Chongqing 401331, People's Republic of China; Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
² Optical & Electronic Materials Unit, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan.
³ Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
⁴ International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan.
⁵ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
⁶ College of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering, Chongqing University of Science and Technology, Chongqing 401331, People's Republic of China.

Abstract

This work describes novel surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates based on ferroelectric periodically poled LiNbO₃ templates. The templates comprise silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), the size and position of which are tailored by ferroelectric lithography. The substrate has uniform and large sampling areas that show SERS effective with excellent signal reproducibility, for which the fabrication protocol is advantageous in its simplicity. We demonstrate ferroelectric-based SERS substrates with particle sizes ranging from 30 to 70 nm and present tunable SERS effect from Raman active 4-mercaptopyridine molecules attached to AgNPs when excited by a laser source at 514 nm.

Keywords: LiNbO3; ferroelectric-based SERS substrate; reproducibility; surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS); tunability.