Au Nanoparticles Coated ZnO Film for Chemical Sensing by PIERS Coupled to SERS

In this work, we present a study on the sensing of chemical molecules with Au nanoparticles coated ZnO film by employing the photo-induced enhanced Raman scattering (PIERS) coupled to the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Moreover, the interest of coupling the PIERS to classical SERS (electromagnetic contribution) is to achieve a high sensitivity of detection. In our work, we employed the thiophenol molecule for its quality of adsorption on metals and its small size. For this thiophenol detection, we found a limit concentration of 100 pM, an adsorption capacity (KAds) of 3.2 × 106 M−1 and an analytical enhancement factor of 1.9 × 1010.