Nanoparticles may have huge impact on detecting trace amounts of various substances. These nano structures when embedded on a surface enhance the Raman scattering absorbed by molecules. This technique is called Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) and is sensitive enough to detect even single molecules of the substance of interest. It may be used to detect chemical compounds and biological substances even from very dilute solutions. Possible applications may be very useful in medical, forensics and industrial researches.
The aim of our research is developing stable, efficient and repetitive SERS substrates, which are crucial for the method sensitivity. In this project our main focus is on improving the parameters of electrochemical nanoparticles deposition on ITO, which we found to be the most promising method of obtaining reliable SERS substrates.
Our research laboratory is equipped with multi-channel (5 channels) potentiostat/galvanostat, the VSP model from BioLogic, allows controlled deposition of metal nanoparticles on a surface. It has a wide range of possibilities of electrochemical applications from fundamental electrochemistry to sensors and corrosion.
The Raman and the SERS analysis are carried out by a small and portable Raman spectrometer (i-Raman) from BWTEK with one laser light source at λ=785 nm. It is coupled with a lab grade raman probe and with a microscope. Two objectives (20x and 50x) and a camera in the microscope allow for observing surfaces, especially of SERS platforms, which is helpful in accurate measurements.