Boron Nitride Nanosheets as Improved and Reusable Substrates for Gold Nanoparticles Enabled Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Abstract

Atomically thin boron nitride (BN) nanosheets have been found an excellent substrate for noble metal particles enabled surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), thanks to their good adsorption of aromatic molecules, high thermal stability and weak Raman scattering. Faceted gold (Au) nanoparticles have been synthesized on BN nanosheets by a simple but controllable and reproducible sputtering and annealing method. The size and density of the Au particles can be controlled by sputtering time, current and annealing temperature etc. Under the same sputtering and annealing conditions, the Au particles on BN of different thicknesses show various sizes because the surface diffusion coefficients of Au depends on the thickness of BN. Intriguingly, decorated with similar morphology and distribution of Au particles, BN nanosheets exhibit better Raman enhancements than silicon substrate as well as bulk BN crystals. Additionally, BN nanosheets show no noticeable SERS signal and hence cause no interference to the Raman signal of analyte. The Au/BN substrates can be reused by heating in air to remove adsorbed analyte without loss of SERS enhancement.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Boron Nitride Nanosheets Improve Sensitivity and Reusability of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy
• Boron Nitride Nanosheet Veiled Gold Nanoparticles for Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering
• Molecule-Induced Conformational Change in Boron Nitride Nanosheets with Enhanced Surface Adsorption
• Atomically Thin Boron Nitride as an Ideal Spacer for Metal-Enhanced Fluorescence
• Two-dimensional van der Waals Heterostructures for Synergistically Improved Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy