Preparation and SERS properties of petaloid Ag nanostructures induced by regular spontaneous stress distribution

Abstract Regular patterned nanostructures are of great importance in functional micro-nano electronic devices and sensing detection. Here, a simple strategy was promoted for fabricating petaloid Ag nanostructures based on Flexible substrate/Metal film (FM) system. The results show that when the interface stress is unsteady, the hexagonal porous on PDMS surface will form regular curvilinear boundary condition to generate uniform interfacial compression stress distribution on the interface of FM system, thus inducing orderly two-dimensional patterns. In this paper, the prepared petaloid Ag nanostructures with small Ag nanoparticles on each petal exhibited sensitive and reliable SERS performance. This simple and feasible method may be beneficial for studying the effect of curve boundary conditions on designing abundant ordered patterns.