Carbon-Dot/Silver-Nanoparticle Flexible SERS-Active Films

Development of effective platforms for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensing has mostly focused on fabrication of colloidal metal surfaces and tuning of their surface morphologies, designed to create "hot spots" in which plasmonic fields yield enhanced SERS signals. We fabricated distinctive SERS-active flexible films comprising polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) embedding carbon dots (C-dots) and coated with silver nano-particles (Ag NPs). We show that the polymer-associated Ag NPs and C-dots intimately affected the physical properties of each other. In particular, the C-dot-Ag-NP-polymer films exhibited SERS properties upon deposition of versatile targets, both conventional SERS-active dyes as well as bacterial samples. We show that the SERS response was correlated to the formation C-dots within the polymer film and the physical proximity between the C-dots and Ag NPs, indicating that coupling between the plasmonic fields of the Ag NPs and C-dots' excitons constituted a prominent factor in the SERS properties.