Investigation of brass as a real-time substrate for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy

The capability of brass as a real time substrate for surface enhanced Raman scattering applications is investigated. In this article, we showed that, using just the ultra-pure water as the electrolyte and the brass electrodes, ions extracted from the anode form nanoparticles on the anode surface in matter of minutes, and these nanoparticles are used for enhancing Raman signal intensity in real time. We observed enhancement factor of more than five orders of magnitude in Raman spectrum of Rhodamine B. We show that the nanoparticles formed on the brass anode surface are copper oxide nanoparticles and the enhancement of Raman signal intensity is due to these (copper oxide) nanoparticles. The zinc atoms do not affect the enhancement factor due to absence of zinc oxide nanoparticles on the anode surface. We present number of reasons to support this view in detail.