Femtosecond Laser Direct Writing of Plasmonic Ag/Pd Alloy Nanostructures Enables Flexible Integration of Robust SERS Substrates

Abstract

This paper demonstrates femtosecond laser direct writing mediated flexible integration of plasmonic Ag/Pd alloy nanostructures that can be potentially used as a robust surface‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy substrate inside the microfluidic chip. Silver–palladium alloy with controllable composition ratio can be patterned into plasmonic nanostructures due to two‐photon absorption induced coreduction of silver/palladium double metal ions. Since the alloy structures can effectively protect the silver from oxidation, thus they can facilitate the stable on‐chip detection devices with long lifetime. The as‐fabricated silver–palladium alloy substrate with 18% content of palladium maintains a relatively high enhancement factor of about 2.62 × 10 8 while at the same time demonstrating the best stability against aerobic oxidation, as it is stable for up to 20 d under ambient aerobic conditions, exhibiting a significant improvement compared to those unprotected silver substrates which have a limited lifetime of only 3 or 4 d.