Density effect of gold nanodisks on the SERS intensity for a highly sensitive detection of chemical molecules

Jean-François Bryche (1, 2) , Raymond Gillibert (3, 2, 4) , Grégory Barbillon (1) , Mitradeep Sarkar (2) , Anne-Lise Coutrot (2) , Frédéric Hamouda (1) , Abdelhanin Aassime (1) , Julien Moreau (2) , Marc Lamy de La Chapelle (3) , Bernard Bartenlian (1) , Michael Canva (2, 5)

1 IEF - Institut d'électronique fondamentale
2 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Biophotonique
3 CSPBAT - Chimie, Structures et Propriétés de Biomatériaux et d'Agents Thérapeutiques
4 HORIBA Scientific [France]
5 LN2 - Laboratoire Nanotechnologies et Nanosystèmes [Sherbrooke]

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a sensitive and widely used as spectroscopic technique for chemical and biological structure analysis. One of the keys to increase the sensitivity of SERS sensors is to use nanoparticles/nanostructures. Here, we report on the density effect of gold nanodisks on SERS intensity for a highly sensitive detection of chemical molecules. Various densities of gold nanodisks with a height of 30 nm on gold/glass substrate were fabricated by electron beam lithography in order to have a good uniformity and reproducibility. The evolution of the enhancement factor (EF) with nanodisk density was quantified and compared to numerical calculations. An EF as high as 2:6 Â 10 7 was measured for the nanodisk with a diameter of 110 nm and a periodicity of 150 nm which corresponds to the highest density (42.2 %).

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Jean-François Bryche, Raymond Gillibert, Grégory Barbillon, Mitradeep Sarkar, Anne-Lise Coutrot, et al.. Density effect of gold nanodisks on the SERS intensity for a highly sensitive detection of chemical molecules. Journal of Materials Science, 2015, 50 (20), pp.6601-6607. ⟨10.1007/s10853-015-9203-x⟩. ⟨hal-01230274⟩