Plasmon-free SERS detection of environmental CO2 on TiO2 surfaces

Year: 2016

Authors: Bontempi N., Carletti L., De Angelis C., Alessandri I.

Autors Affiliation: INSTM and Chemistry for Technologies Laboratory, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, University of Brescia, via Branze 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy;
Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, via Branze 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy

Abstract: SiO2/TiO2 core/shell beads (T-rex) were designed, fabricated and tested for Raman detection of environmental CO2 under real-working conditions, as those encountered, for example, in solar-to-fuel conversion reactions. The exploitation of light trapping and morphology dependent resonances was crucial for extending the limit of detection of CO2 adsorbed on TiO2 surfaces. T-rex beads allowed for achieving surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) without using plasmonic metals showing high-efficiency, fast response and reproducibility in CO2 detection in both air and solvents. The dependence of SERS activity on Mie-type resonances was investigated through a systematic comparison of experimental data and numerical simulations, demonstrating that T-rex beads can be tailored for the detection of gaseous environmental pollutants on the basis of simple, Mie-scattering based calculations. Three-dimensional T-rex colloidal crystals were also successfully tested in precise, in situ, real time detection of CO2 as a function of different temperature-sweep cycles.

Journal/Review: NANOSCALE

Volume: 8 (6)      Pages from: 3226  to: 3231

More Information: We thank M. Salmistraro and I. Vassalini for experimental support and valuable discussions and M. Ferroni for assistance in SEM analysis. C. De Angelis acknowledges the partial support of the U.S. Army under the Grant W911NF-15-1-0359.
DOI: 10.1039/c5nr08380j

Citations: 68
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