Fabrication of surface enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) substrates made from nanoparticle printing inks for detection of biological molecules

Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has generated great interest as a surface analytical technique because it can produce amplification factors between 108-1012. Silver and gold are the most widely used components as their size and structure allows for light to induce conduction electrons to oscillate locally within the nanoparticle structure. When a molecule lies in the interparticle space between two nanoparticles, highly detailed vibrational information becomes detectable. The objective of this study is to reproducibly fabricate such an arrangement in a nanoparticle substrate while maintaining stability.;In this work, nanoparticle printing inks -- colloidal nanoparticles encapsulated by a stabilizing ligand -- are used as the main component of SERS substrates. The ligand shell is partially removed by controlled heating, which reduces spacing between nanoparticles creating a broad distribution of interparticle distances. Similar to fractal aggregates this arrangement allows localized plasmons to naturally resonate over a broad range of spectral frequencies.;Microwave absorption is applied as a non-invasive method to sensitively monitor nanoparticle sintering in order to gauge the substrates' tuning for large amplification factors. The global arrangement of nanoparticles has always been difficult to measure during heating through DC resistivity measurements and surface imaging techniques. Microwave absorption occurs in the weak resistive links formed between particles during sintering due to the microwave losses in loosely coupled particles. By placing the substrate in a microwave cavity, absorption can be monitored globally during heating. The largest SERS amplification factors occur at a stage immediately preceding the largest microwave absorption gains. This provides a useful method for determining a thermal window for heating when optimizing SERS substrates.;Finally, these optimized SERS substrates are used to detect hyaluronic acid. This complex molecule is a potential biomarker for inflammatory diseases but it has only been detected at a concentration of 5 mg/mL on commercially available SERS substrates. Here it is shown that functionalizing the SERS substrate with a self-assembled monolayer lowers the limit of detection to 50 μg/mL. SERS analysis also provides structural details about the conformation of the molecule during adsorption.