A facile fabrication of Ag-Au-Ag nanostructures with nanogaps for intensified surface-enhanced Raman scattering

Abstract Nanogap between two metallic nanostructures has been demonstrated to be able to efficiently concentrate an incident electromagnetic field into a small space. As a result, the formed strong field localization could extraordinarily enhance the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). In this study, controllable plasmonic nanogaps are formed by separating two layers of plasmonic Ag nanoparticles (50–100 nm) with small Au nanoparticles (2.5–6 nm). The size of the nanogaps can be readily tuned by altering the size of the Au nanoparticles. Utilizing an SERS substrate with such nanogaps, the SERS performance can be significantly improved. Such improvement could be attributed to the strongly enhanced electric field within the nanogaps, which is demonstrated by the Finite-difference time-domain simulations. The present work provides a facile strategy to rationally fabricate SERS substrates with controllable nanogaps and intensified SERS signals.