Glass Nanopillar Arrays with Nanogap-Rich Silver Nanoislands for Highly Intense Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering

The enhancement of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) with nanogap-rich silver nanoislands surrounding glass nanopillars at wafer level is reported. High-density hot spots are generated by increasing the number of nanogap-rich nanoislands within a detection volume. The SERS substrate shows a high enhancement factor of over 10⁷ with excellent signal uniformity (∼7.8%) and it enables the label-free detection of aqueous DNA base molecules at nanomolar level.