A Comprehensive Survey of Plasmonic Nano-Dendrites: From Fabrication to SERS applications

Abstract

Dendrites are the one of the beautifully designed branched structures found everywhere in nature, for example in neurons, snow flaks, tress etc. These unique structured properties of dendritic structures resemble their applications for tissue integration, light manipulation, energy storage, charge transport, sensors etc. In recent years, plasmonic nanodendrites have been extensively employed for SERS applications incorporating the highly dense electromagnetic field hot spots at the dendritic tips in addition to increased surface area. These structures have shown their potential for sensing a large range of analytes including explosives, pesticides, bacteria, virus sensing etc. This review gives in-depth information about the fundamentals of the SERS mechanism, fabrication techniques to manipulate dendrite structures for enhanced SERS performance, and the role of nano dendrite structures in SERS applications. Through an extensive survey, the review complies with the till date current state of art technology for developing plasmonic dendrites and applying them of SERS based sensing applications. At the end, we conclude the review of current challenges and future prospective of developing such sensors.