Yuanyuan Luo

Electrochemically induced flowerlike gold nanoarchitectures and their strong surface-enhanced Raman scattering effect

The authors report the fabrication of gold flowerlike nanoarchitectures (FNs) on indium tin oxide coated glass substrate using a low-cost electrochemical strategy at a proper current density and polyvinylpyrrolidone concentration in electrolyte. The FNs are grown and built with the blocks of two-dimensional flakelike nanostructures. Importantly, such FNs show strong surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effect associated with their geometries, which is much stronger than that from other particle films. The minimum concentration of detectable rhodamine 6G molecules can be down to 10−12M. These FNs with strong SERS effect could be used in chemical analysis, biosensors, and nanodevices with molecule-level detection.

Hierarchical surface rough ordered Au particle arrays and their surface enhanced Raman scattering

A simple, effective, and low-cost method is presented to fabricate an ordered Au particle array with hierarchical surface roughness on an indium tin oxide substrate based on an ordered alumina through-pore template, induced by solution dipping on colloidal monolayer, using an electrochemical deposition strategy. The array consists of periodically arranged and isolated Au microparticles, which show nanoscaled surface roughness. Importantly, this hierarchically rough particle array exhibits strong surface-enhanced Raman scattering effect using rhodamine 6G as probe molecules, associated with its surface geometry. Such structure could be useful, e.g., in sensors, biotechnology, and nanodevices.

General Synthesis of 2D Ordered Hollow Sphere Arrays Based on Nonshadow Deposition Dominated Colloidal Lithography

A general strategy, nonshadow deposition dominated colloidal lithography (NSCL), was proposed for the synthesis of two-dimensional (2D) ordered hollow sphere arrays of conductive materials. Gold, polypyrrole, CdS, and ZnO were taken as model materials to demonstrate the NSCL strategy, and built as 2D hollow sphere arrays successfully. In this strategy, a thin gold coating is first introduced on a polystyrene sphere (PS) colloidal monolayer via ion-sputtering deposition, and a hollow sphere array can thus be obtained by further electrochemical deposition on such a monolayer and by subsequent removal of PSs. The proposed strategy is flexible and facile to control the microstructure and size of the hollow sphere array, and the features are as follows: (i) controllable shell of the hollow sphere from single-layer to multilayer with single or multiple compositions, (ii) tunable morphology from simple structure to hierarchical micro/nanostructure, and (iii) changeable arrangement of hollow spheres from close-packing to non-close-packing. Besides these, the hollow sphere size and the shell thickness can also be controlled by changing the colloidal sphere and deposition time, respectively. Further investigation indicates that the success of NSCL should be owed to a key step, that is, an ion-sputtering induced nonshadow deposition surrounding the whole surfaces of colloidal spheres. This allows an equipotential face and thus homogeneous deposition surrounding the surfaces of PSs in an electrochemical deposition process, and final formation of hollow sphere structure. The 2D ordered hollow sphere arrays with controllable microstructure and size could exhibit importance both in fundamental research and in practical applications.

Design and Electrochemical Fabrication of Gold Binary Ordered Micro/Nanostructured Porous Arrays via Step-by-Step Colloidal Lithography

Colloidal lithography is a low-cost, high-throughput, facile nanofabrication technique capable of producing a large variety of nanostructured arrays. In this letter, we report a methodology, named step-by-step colloidal lithography, using electrochemical deposition as a fabrication technique to sculpture various hexagonally packed 2D-ordered gold binary micro/nanostructured porous arrays. By the designed fabrication routes, the structures of arrays and the morphology of the building blocks in the arrays can be easily controlled. Because of the feature of step-by-step fabrication, such a strategy will provide a versatile methodology not only for unitary components but also for binary and even multiplex materials, leading to heterostructured arrays with controlled compositions and block sizes. Such morphology and structure-controlled 2D binary porous arrays will exhibit the importance in building micro/nanostructured devices.