Electrochemical deposition mediated growth of hierarchical Au architectures and the applications for SERS

Abstract

A self-assembly process has been developed to artificially fabricate hierarchical Au architectures without adding any templates or directing agents via an external electric field assisted particle-mediated “bottom-up” assembling methodology. The investigation on the morphology evolution reveals that the parameters (including various growth times, applied potentials and concentrations of HAuCl₄ solution) were critical to control the assembly of the hierarchical Au architectures. The appearance of these novel hierarchical Au architectures can be attributed to the OA and external electric field assisted ordering alignment mechanism. The obtained Au architectures are found to yield large surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) enhancement factors for rhodamine 6G (R6G).