Gas-Phase Deposited Plasmonic Nanoparticles Supported on 3D-Graphene/Nickel Foam for Highly SERS Detection

In this work, we proposed a novel three-dimensional (3D) plasmonic nanostructure based on porous graphene/nickel foam (GNF) and gas-phase deposited Ag nanoparticles (NPs).Ag NPs with high density were directly deposited on the surface of 3D GNF by performing a novel cluster beam deposition approach. In comparison with traditional Ag substrate(SiO₂/Ag), such hot-spots enriched 3D nanostructure showed extremely high electromag-netic field enhancement under incident light irradiation which could be used as a sensitive chemical sensor based on surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed nanostructure showed superior SERS performance in terms of Raman signal reproducibility and sensitivity for the probe molecules. 3D full-wave simulation showed that the enhanced SERS performance in this 3D hierarchical plasmonic nanostructure was mainly obtained from the hot-spots between Ag NPs and the near-field coupling between Ag NPs and GNF sca olds. This work can provide a novel assembled SERS substrate as a SERS-based chemical sensor in practical applications.