Reproducible SERRS from structured gold surfaces

Abstract

Metallic substrates with ordered spherical cavities have been shown to be very effective for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and can be fabricated reproducibly using electrodeposition. The sensitivity of detection is increased by several orders of magnitude by using surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS). In this report we demonstrate SERRS for the first time on electrodeposited gold films templated with colloidal spheres and demonstrate the reproducibility of the response. We also obtain a direct comparison between SERRS and SERS by choosing two dyes, Cy5™ and Cy3™, which are similar in structure but differ in their excitation maxima, such that one is resonant and the other non-resonant with our laser excitation. As expected, the resonant enhancement is found to be of the order of 10³ over and above that for SERS. The net SERRS enhancements are shown to be of the order of 10⁹. We also find that the resonant enhancement profile of the different peaks for the chromophore follows the plasmonic resonance absorption spectrum obtained for the structured surface.