Direct two-phase interfacial self-assembly of aligned silver nanowire films for surface enhanced Raman scattering applications

Assembly of nanowires into ordered macroscopic structures has attracted great scientific interest in the past decade. In this work, we report on a rapid low-cost scalable oil–water (two-phase) interfacial self-assembly process for fabricating aligned Ag nanowire (AgNW) films on solid substrates. This process is much simpler than traditional Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) techniques and allows the assembly of one-dimensional Ag nanowires on any solid substrate without extra pretreatment of either the surface of silver nanowires or the solid substrate. The resultant aligned AgNW films can be used as robust surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates for chemical and biomolecular detection with highly uniform and repeatable SERS signals over the entire substrate. Sensitive and quantitative detection of the toxicant arsenic in drinking water using these AgNW films are subsequently presented to demonstrate potential applications for environmental pollutant analysis.