Synthesis of flower-like silver nanoparticles for SERS application

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is an optical spectroscopic analysis techniques for the highly sensitive detection of molecules adsorbed on metal surfaces, mainly Ag, Au, and Cu. Surface enhancement can yield the increasing in intensity more than a factor of 106. [1] In general, there are two mechanisms involve in SERS: chemical enhancement and electromagnetic enhancement. Chemical enhancement is come from the interaction between adsorbed molecules and the metal surface, while electromagnetic enhancement due to the surface plasmon resonance of nanoscale surface roughness in the 10–200 nm range. The largest SERS enhancement are often present in between aggregated metal nanoparticles.[2] Surface roughness also play an important role on giving enhancement of SERS effect. Hongyan, et al have been succeeded synthesis highly surface-roughened flower-like silver particles with sizes from 500 nm to 2 µm.[3]