Facile Fabrication of Gold Functionalized Nanopipette for Nanoscale Electrochemistry and Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Publication date: August 2019Source: Chinese Journal of Analytical Chemistry, Volume 47, Issue 8Author(s): Hong-Na LI, Dan YANG, Ao-Xue LIU, Guo-Hui LIU, Yu-Ping SHAN, Guo-Cheng YANG, Jin HEAbstractNanopipette has emerged as a versatile nanosensor. It is desirable to expand the sensing capabilities of nanopipette by integrating multiple sensing methods into one nanopipette. In this work, we presented a seeded growth approach to facilely, cheaply and quickly deposit a gold layer with controllable length at the inner surface of the nanopipette tip. The deposited gold formed a wireless ring-shape gold nanoelectrode at the nanopipette tip and enabled multimode single entity detection. With the presence of gold at the nanopipette apex, the nanopore based resistive-pulse sensing capability was obviously improved. The integrated ring-shape gold nanoelectrode could be used as a wireless bipolar electrode for electrochemical measurement. We further demonstrated that the gold coated nanopipette could be used as a substrate for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy.Graphical abstractThe small gold nanoparticles were introduced to speed up the gold deposition process, the whole process only needs a few minutes. The deposited gold formed a wireless ring-shape gold nanoelectrode at the nanopipette tip and enabled multimode single entity detection. In addition, the ring-shape gold at the nanopipette tip could be used as a bipolar nanoelectrode and as an effective substrate for SERS.
Source: Chinese Journal of Analytical Chemistry - Category: Chemistry Source Type: research