Study of SERS-Active substrates for low-concentration detection

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a highly efficient technique due to its ability to detect several analytes at low concentrations, such as proteins, pesticides, heavy metals, environmental monitoring, food safety, biochemical sensing, and others. One of the most critical applications of SERS detection is herbicides. Glyphosate (GLP) is the herbicide with the highest global commercialization, and historical use (NOVOTNY, 2022; MARTINS-GOMES et al., 2022). Even though numerous studies have found the substance harmless, current research demonstrates that GLP might affect human health (RIVAS-GARCIA et al., 2022). For this reason, researchers are concentrating on alterna- tives for analytical quantification, such as SERS. In this work, DVD-R@AgNPs and PSi@AgNPs SERS-actives substrates were produced by the Cathodic Cage Plasma Deposition (CCPD) technique, which allowed a thin film layer deposition of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on the polycarbonate (PC) grating structure from Digital Video/Versatile Disc Recordable (DVD-R) and on the porous silicon (PSi) structure. Scanning Electron Microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy was used to characterize the substrates and chemical changes on the surfaces after AgNPs de- position. DVD-R@AgNPs and PSi@AgNPs substrates were used to detect standard crystal violet (CV), standard GLP, and RoundupTM GLP (GLP-RU) using Raman Spectroscopy measurements. The CV was used as a control dye molecule to calculate the enhance- ment factors, which value was in the order of ~105 for both substrates. To evaluate the efficiency of the SERS substrates, the analytes limit of detection was calculated. For DVD-R@AgNPs, the lowest concentration detected was ~10-10 M for CV, 10-7 and 10-8 M for GLP and 10-6 M for GLP-RU. While for PSi@AgNPs, ~10-12 M for CV and 10-2 M for GLP-RU were the lowest concentrations obtained. Despite this value, PSi@AgNPs is a good SERS platform for AgNPs deposition, via CCPD, and it needs to enhance the sensitivity for herbicide traces detection as GLP-RU. Accordingly, the DVD-R@AgNPs SERS sensor is a low-cost and promising substrate that analyzes traces of commercial GLP, demonstrating high SERS sensitivities.