Abstract
Although Raman spectroscopy has been commercialized, low-cost and large-area surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates with localized enhanced field are heavily required. However, currently dominant manufacturing techniques are expensive and complicated for large-area fabrication. Furthermore, most SERS substrates can only be used for individual excitation wavelengths. In this work, we will report an ultra-broadband super absorbing metasurface to enhance SERS signals in a broadband region (i.e. from 450 nm to 1000 nm). The design consisting of an Ag ground plate, a SiO2 spacer, and a layer of Ag nanoparticles was fabricated using simple film deposition and thermal annealing techniques. A broadband absorption over 80% from 414 nm to 956 nm was obtained, resulting in localized field enhancement between adjacent nanoparticles. We employed this metasurface to test its broadband SERS signal by adsorbing 1,2-Bis(4-pyridyl)-ethylene (BPE) molecules on top of it. We employed 5 laser lines (i.e., 514, 532, 633, 671 and 785 nm) to excite the sample and observed fingerprint signature of BPE molecules under all 5 excitation wavelengths with the average enhancement factor up to 5.3×107. Therefore, the designed SERS substrate can work for almost “all” available excitation wavelengths over a broadband, which is particularly useful for sensing a broad spectrum of chemicals on the same chip.