Fabrication of Quartz Nanocone Forests for Transparent Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Devices

In this work, quartz nanocone forests are prepared by adopting two steps of reactive ion etchings. Subsequently, metal nanoparticles are sputtered on the nanocone forests, thus a transparent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) device is obtained. With such a transparent SERS device, laser can be incident from back-side of the device, thus is able to avoid influence of cap layers, fluids and analyte molecules on laser propagation and signal collections. In addition, ascribe to excellent light transmittance of the quartz substrate, spectra from the back-side show even higher intensity than those from the front-side, especially at conditions of large analyte concentrations. This indicates a way to broaden detection ranges for microfluidic SERS devices.