Bimodal porous gold opals for molecular sensing

We have fabricated bimodal porous gold skeletons by double-templating routes using poly(styrene) colloidal opals as templates. The fabricated gold skeletons show a bimodal pore-size distribution, with small pores within spheres and large pores between spheres. The templated bimodal porous gold skeletons were applied in Raman scattering experiments to study sensing efficiency for probe molecules. We found that the bimodal porous gold skeletons showed obvious enhancement of Raman scattering signals versus that of the unimodal porous gold which only has interstitial pores of several hundred nanometers.