Large-area, cost-effective Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) substrates fabrication

•Low-cost large-area fabrication techniques of SERS substrates.•Highly reproducible nanoscale features without any expensive masking step.•Block copolymer and black silicon to pattern either nanopillars or nanospheres.•The impact of features density on the SERS signal intensity.

This work describes two low-cost, large-area fabrication techniques of SERS substrates. Both are capable of providing highly reproducible nanoscale features without any expensive masking step. The first one is based on the use of block copolymer (BCP) to pattern either nanopillars or nanospheres with controllable diameters and lattice spacing while the second one is based on the elaboration of dense and homogeneous arrays or forest of nanotips structures. For both techniques, promising SERS spectra were obtained by using Rhodamine 6G as a probe molecule. Moreover, in the case of a nanotips forest or array, the impact of features’ density on the SERS signal intensity was demonstrated. It was shown that the SERS effect can be noticeably enhanced simply by tuning the plasma etching parameters.

Graphical abstractThis work describes two low-cost, large-area fabrication techniques of SERS substrates. Both are capable of providing highly reproducible nanoscale features without any expensive masking step. The first one is based on the use of block copolymer (BCP) to pattern either nanopillars or nanospheres with controllable diameters and lattice spacing while the second one is based on the elaboration of dense and homogeneous nanotips forest structures. For both techniques, promising SERS spectra were obtained by using Rhodamine 6G as molecule probe. Moreover, in the case of nanotips forest, the impact of features density on the SERS signal intensity was demonstrated. By simply tuning the plasma etching parameters, it was shown that the SERS effect can be noticeably enhanced.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide