Facile synthesis of hybrid silver/porous carbon black substrate for surface-enhanced Raman scattering

The progress of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is inseparable from the development of SERS substrates. Simple and rapid preparation of the SERS substrate has become an important research field. In this paper, we report a facile flame deposition method to fabricate three-dimensional porous carbon black (CB) nanostructures to form a dot array patterned by a mask. The chain-like nanostructures of CB facilitates the formation of discrete Ag nanoparticles, which provides a large number of "hotspots" that induce the local enhancement of the electromagnetic fields. Therefore, the hybrid Ag/CB substrate shows excellent SERS performance. The detection limit of Rhodamine 6G was down to 10(-11) M and the enhancement factor was up to 1.48 x 10(9). Uniform detection of Raman signals was achieved by the array of Ag/CB dots. Furthermore, the hybrid substrates can also detect melamine mixed with milk and ultrapure water with a concentration of 10(-7) M, which indicates their potential applications for food security detection.