Air Heating Approach for Multilayer Etching and Roll-to-Roll Transfer of Silicon Nanowire Arrays as SERS Substrates for High Sensitivity Molecule Detection

SiNW array represents an attractive system for construction of high-performance energy, electronic, and sensor devices. To meet the demand for flexible devices as well as address the concern about the full use of the Si material, large-area transfer of the SiNW array from growth substrate is very desirable. Here, we report a simple air heating approach to achieve the multilayer etched SiNW array. This method allows the fabrication of up to a five-layer (while perfectly three-layer) cracked SiNW array on single-crystalline Si wafer via a templateless metal-assisted etching approach. Fractures could happen at the crack position when an appropriate pressure was applied on the SiNW array, facilitating the wafer-scale layer-by-layer transfer of the SiNW array onto a flexible substrate through a low-cost and time-efficient roll-to-roll (R2R) technique. Further releasing of the SiNW array to other receiving substrates was accomplished with the aid of a thermal release tape. After modification with sliver nanoparticles (AgNPs), the flexible SiNW array showed great potential as a high-sensitivity surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrate for detecting rhodamine 6G (R6G) molecule with concentration as low as 10–9 M.