A semi-colloidal substrate for surface enhanced Raman scattering

In this work, we utilize the electrolysis effect to prepare a semi-colloidal substrate for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) applications in which the nanoparticles created on the anode surface act as an active medium for SERS. The experiments carried out with copper (Cu) as the electrode and Rhodamine B (RhB) as the electrolyte. The measured enhancement factor (EF) of the Raman peaks of RhB is more than five orders of magnitude. The proposed method has some key advantages: it is a very simple and low cost technique and also can be used in real time since it is a quite fast process.