Concave gold nanocubes on Al-6063 alloy as a simple and efficient SERS substrate

Abstract We report a simple fabrication of SERS substrates, using active concave gold nanocubes deposited by drop casting onto the surface of an APTS-functionalized electrochemical polished aluminum slide (Al-6063 Alloy). The SERS substrate was examined by means of scanning electron microscopy, and it showed that the gold nanocubes formed more than one monolayer and they were randomly oriented on the aluminum surface, having a mean size of 58 ± 7 nm. The performance of the SERS substrate was tested using Rhodamine 6G, Rose Bengal and Crystal Violet as analytes; the lowest detected concentrations were 2.22 × 10 −13 , 1.00 × 10 −12 and 1.00 × 10 −10  M respectively. Our results show that concave gold nanocubes combined with an inexpensive electrochemical polished aluminum slide performs very efficiently as a SERS substrate.