Assembly of graphene oxide and Au 0.7Ag 0.3 alloy nanoparticles on SiO 2: A new Raman substrate with ultrahigh signal-to-background ratio

Abstract

Resonance Raman spectroscopy (RRS) often suffers from the large fluorescence background which obscures the much weaker Raman scattering. To address this fundamental problem, a novel Raman substrate has been fabricated by adsorption of Au 0.7Ag 0.3 alloy nanoparticles (NPs) on a graphene oxide (GO) coated SiO 2 surface, which offers both excellent Raman enhancement and fluorescence quenching. Our experimental data reveal that a Raman to fluorescence background intensity ratio of 1.6 can be obtained for a highly fluorescent dye like Alexa fluor 488. Moreover, we demonstrate that the Raman enhancement mainly originates from the Au 0.7Ag 0.3 alloy NPs and that the fluorescence quenching mainly arises from the underlying functionalized GO (FGO) substrate. © 2011 American Chemical Society.