Plasmonic metasurface assisted by thermally imprinted polymer nano‐well array for surface enhanced Raman scattering

Abstract

Abstract Plasmonic nanometasurfaces/nanostructures possess strong electromagnetic field enhancement caused by resonant oscillations of free electrons, and has been extensively applied in biosensing, nanophotonic and photocatalysis. However, fabrication of uniform nanostructured metasurfaces by conventional methods is complicated and costly, which mitigates a wide‐spread use of this technique in ubiquitous applications. Here, we present a facile and scalable method to fabricate an active nanotrench plasmonic gold substrate. The surface comprises sub‐10 nm plasmonic nanogaps and their formation is assisted by a pre‐fabrication of nano‐imprinted polymer nano‐well arrays. The plasmonic metasurface is optimized to maximize the density of the nano‐trenches by tuning the substrate material, imprinting procedure and film deposition. We show that the surface Raman enhancement due to plasmonic resonances correlates well with trench density and reach a meritorious enhancement factor of EF > 105 over large surfaces. We further show that the electric field strength at the nanotrench features are well explained by finite element method simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics. The plasmonic substrate is transparent in the visible spectrum and conductive. In combination with a scalable bottom‐up fabrication the plasmonic metasurface opens up for a wider use of the sensitive and reliable SERS substrate in applications such as portable sensing devices and for future internet of things.

Keywords

• nanoimprinting
• nanotrenches
• nano‐well array
• plasmonic metasurface
• SERS