Preparation of Fe3O4-Ag Nanocomposites with Silver Petals for SERS Application
Thi Thuy Nguyen, Fayna Mammeri, Souad Ammar, Thi Bich Ngoc Nguyen, Trọng Nghĩa Nguyễn, Thi Ha Lien Nghiem, Nguyễn Thị Thủy, T.A. Ho, Thi Ha Lien Nghiem, Nguyễn Thị Thủy, T.A. Ho
Abstract
The formation of silver nanopetal-Fe3O4 poly-nanocrystals assemblies and the use of the resulting hetero-nanostructures as active substrates for Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) application are here reported. In practice, about 180 nm sized polyol-made Fe3O4 spheres, constituted by 10 nm sized crystals, were functionalized by (3-aminopropyl)triethoxysilane (APTES) to become positively charged, which can then electrostatically interact with negatively charged silver seeds. Silver petals were formed by seed-mediated growth in presence of Ag+ cations and self-assembly, using L-ascorbic acid (L-AA) and polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) as mid-reducing and stabilizing agents, respectively. The resulting plasmonic structure provides a rough surface with plenty of hot spots able to locally enhance significantly any applied electrical field. Additionally, they exhibited a high enough saturation magnetization with Ms = 9.7 emu g−1 to be reversibly collected by an external magnetic field, which shortened the detection time. The plasmonic property makes the engineered Fe3O4-Ag architectures particularly valuable for magnetically assisted ultra-sensitive SERS sensing. This was unambiguously established through the successful detection, in water, of traces, (down to 10−10 M) of Rhodamine 6G (R6G), at room temperature.