Synergistic Enhancement Effect for Boosting Raman Detection Sensitivity of Antibiotics

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Abstract
In this paper, a two-step method is used to prepare a regenerative three-dimension (3D) ZnO/[email protected] substrate for developing superior sensitive surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) method for detecting antibiotics. A great electromagnetic enhancement is observed from as-prepared composite substrate, which is triggered by tuning electron distribution of metals and semiconductor metal oxide. The strong interaction between target sample and the huge surface area of ZnO/[email protected] composite promotes the charge transfer to produce promising chemical enhancement. The synergistically physical and chemical enhancement mechanism is validated by density functional theory (DFT) and finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation. Additionally, the presence of light “echo effect” in 3D structure of ZnO support could also amplify the efficiency of light excitation for Raman scattering. The above-stated merits benefit to boost the Raman scattering detection sensitivity for real samples. The ZnO/[email protected] SERS substrate could detect Rhodamine 6G (R6G) molecules with an enhancement factor up to 1.48×109 and the lowest detectable concentration of 10-10 M. As a real application, antibiotics sulfapyridine in milk is determined by using proposed SERS protocol and the limit of detection (LOD) at 1×10-9 M could be reached. As a prospective, the ZnO/[email protected] SERS method would be extended for food safety and biomedicine analysis.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (21475088)
  • International Joint Laboratory on Resource Chemistry
  • Shanghai Municipal Education Committee Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging Probes and Sensors
  • Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Functional Materials

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