A solution to the fabrication and tarnishing problems of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) fiber probes

Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) fiber probes have enormous potential in optical sensing applications. However, their widespread use has been hindered by two major obstacles: the difficulty of fabricating the required silver nanostructures on optical fibers and the tarnishing of silver, rapidly degrading their sensing properties. Here we propose a solution to these dilemmas by abandoning the use of metallic silver and conventional nanofabrication procedures. Instead, we base our fabrication on chemically stable silver chloride and show that it can be directly grown on the optical fibers without any advanced fabrication equipment. As silver chloride itself is not SERS-active, we demonstrate how to “activate” the probes by turning the crystals into metallic silver nanostructures via photoreduction. We verify that if stored in the non-activated stage, the sensing properties of the structures remain unchanged. Finally, we demonstrate the high sensitivity (signal-to-noise ratio up to 42 ± 3 dB) of the probes in real-time in situ measurements at nanomolar analyte concentrations.