Compact Shielding of Graphene Monolayer Leads to Extraordinary SERS-Active Substrate with Large-Area Uniformity and Long-Term Stability

Abstract

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) can significantly boost the inherently weak Raman scattering signal and provide detailed structural information and binding nature of the molecules on the surface. Despite the long history of this technology, SERS has yet to become a sophisticated analytical tool in practical applications. A major obstacle is the absence of high-quality and stable SERS-active substrate. In this work, we report a monolayer graphene-shielded periodic metallic nanostructure as large-area uniform and long-term stable SERS substrate. The monolayer graphene acting as a corrosion barrier, not only greatly enhanced stability, but also endowed many new features to the substrate, such as alleviating the photo-induced damages and improving the detection sensitivity for certain analytes that are weakly adsorbed on the conventional metallic substrates. Besides, our fabrication strategy were also capable of fabricating the reproducible SERS sensing spots array, which may serve as a promising high-throughput or multi-analyte sensing platform. Taken together, the graphene-shielded SERS substrate holds great promise both in fundamental studies of the SERS effect and many practical fields.