Gold Electrodeposition on Porous Polymeric Templates for Raman Spectroscopy

Abstract Usual approaches for SERS active substrate confection rely mainly on top-down lithographic procedures, with several advantages as precision and reproducibility, yet at the price of costly equipments and time-consuming protocols. Among the bottom-up alternatives, spin-coated porous PMMA films were produced on top of a conducting substrate in a single-step fashion, therefore delimiting confined electroactive regions inside the pores of a few hundreds of nanometers in diameter. This methodology allows the electrodeposition of a range of materials with controllable geometry and filling, such as agglomerated gold nanoparticles and flat disks, presenting both good stability and reproducibility [1]. The SEM micrographs are shown in Figure 1. Raman measurements, Figure 2, were acquired after addition of Rhodamine 6G 10-5 M on both structured surfaces and spectra were collected on randomly selected sample spots, with laser excitation on 633 nm and 785 nm wavelengths, exhibiting good reproducibility.