Bionic SERS chip with super-hydrophobic and plasmonic micro/nano dual structure

Natural surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) chips based on plants or insects have gained increased attention due to their facile characteristics and low costs. However, such chips remain a major challenge for practical application because of poor reproducibility and stability as well as unavoidable damage to the surface structure during coating metal and uncontrolled dehydration. By using a simple wrinkling method, we develop a new route to fabricate a low-cost bionic SERS chip for practical detection. Inspired by the taro leaf, we fabricate a SERS chip with a super-hydrophobic and plasmonic micro/nano dual structure, and its structure parameters can be optimized. Compared with the natural taro-leaf SERS chip, our artificial chip exhibits Raman signals with an order of magnitude higher sensitivity (similar to 10(-9) M) and enhancement factor (similar to 10(7)) under the illumination of weak laser radiation, demonstrating that our SERS chip has great potential in biological detection. The excellent performances of our bionic SERS chip are attributed to a synergy of optimized micro-wrinkle and nano-nest, which is verified by experiment and simulation. We believe our bionic chip could be a promising candidate in practical application due to its merits such as simple fabricating process, optimizable structure, low cost, excellent homogeneity, high sensitivity, and stability. (c) 2018 Chinese Laser Press